AngryWorkers's Blog

While waiting for further announcements from Zarah and Jeremy…

We are about to distribute a new issue of Vital Signs Magazine amongst our 18,000 fellow hospital workers here in Bristol. Vital Signs is independent and we could do with donations to cover our print-costs.

What is Vital Signs?

Vital Signs is the publication of a small circle of communists who organise meetings and actions with fellow health workers, e.g. against the exclusion of precarious bank workers from the NHS pay increase or against outsourcing of hospital theatres to private companies or against the military attack on health workers in other parts of the globe. 

Vital Signs is an experiment of new independent working class politics. We are not aware of many other explicitly revolutionary workplace publications in the UK and hope to contribute to the debate through practical experience. Through a process of sustained activity and publication, our aim is to create a basis upon which a new independent communist organisation can be built. We see this organisation as being grounded in the creation of workers’ political committees in mass workplaces and neighbourhoods. We don’t only see this as a point of principle, but as a practical necessity in conducting effective working class struggles.

What are strategic class locations?

As revolutionaries we are a minoritarian segment of the working class and we have to decide strategically where to base our political activity. The decision of where we focus our activity should not be led by an insular organisational interest, e.g. how can we recruit as many new members to our particular organisation. Instead, it should be led by the question of where struggles of our class can be powerful, break down social divisions within the class and develop a new political horizon. 

The UK left is largely concentrated in a few areas: education, hospitality, the voluntary or NGO sector. This means that we are out of touch with many strategic locations. For example with new industries and the engineering sector, where the contradictions between the potential of new technologies and their capitalist application become the most apparent; traditional industries like truck driving or construction, where the combination of internationalisation and self-employment has contributed to the fact that the far-right has gained more of a foot-hold; the essential mass industries that are necessary to take-over in order to produce new social and natural relations, e.g. energy, transport, health, agriculture and manufacturing

A revolutionary organisation has to be able to connect the various elements that different segments of our class bring to the table of social rupture: the socially detached technical knowledge, the experience of industrial collectivity, the experiments of different ways of working and living, the mass anger and proletarian violence. For that we need strategies based on intricate class analysis.

What is revolutionary politics within the workplace?

In general, leftist workplace politics often reproduces the bourgeois separation between economic and political struggle. We see traditional workplace bulletins that primarily focus on rank-and-file ‘trade union’ issues and add leftist positions as external politics. 

With Vital Signs we are attempting to do something different. We try to uncover, with our fellow workers, how ‘political decisions’ of the state impact on our working lives and how the structure of the health sector itself is political. We try to criticise the capitalist nature of how our work within the NHS is structured, from the stifling division between intellectual / scientific and manual labour to the hurdles that both bureaucratic and market relations create for our daily cooperation at work. We want to understand the intricate and global structures of the health sector in order to envision how it can be run by workers themselves, in the interest of all.  

Here we see a direct relation between the experience of self-organisation in the daily struggle to defend our wages and conditions, to an expansion of worker control and social responsibility as workers, to the development of a plan to take-over our industries and defend them against our class enemy. 

For example, for this issue of Vital Signs we interviewed pharmaceutical workers in order to share insights about the contradictions of this segment of the health sector. We spoke to admin workers and occupational therapists, whose labour is often hidden from the rest of the hospital work-force. We wrote on our responsibility as surgical theatre workers to find out where tissue or bone donations originate from. We also included an article that denounces the current migration politics of the state as a divisive attack against the lowest paid workers. We analyse the strengths and weaknesses of recent health workers strikes, and we include information about recent international workers’ actions against war and militarisation.

From collective to party

Rather than waiting for the next hype, for the next ‘mass vehicle’, we have to start small steps of communist politics within our class and reflect on them openly and self-critically for others. From these real experiences we can coordinate practical actions and centralise our strategies in new forms of political organisation. 

We cannot dilute a proletarian perspective, which assumes the need for an insurrectionary take-over of the means of production and the defeat of the state forces, by getting lost in electoral politics. We have to prepare ourselves and our fellow workers for the task of transforming the current system of production and distribution. Electoral politics is incapable of preparing us for this, on the contrary, they contribute to the individualisation of our class of collective producers by addressing them as citizens. Voting and the hope that the right people on top will fix things for us turn us into passive spectators.

If the DSA or Die Linke are anything to go by then hundreds, perhaps thousands of comrades of the radical left in the UK are likely to spend most of their political energy on fighting over internal platforms and factions within Your Party, believing that they are engaging in working class politics. It is a political black hole that is structurally limited by UK parliamentarism and its legal system.

This doesn’t mean that the emergence of Your Party is irrelevant. We have to find each other in these tense times. Let’s make sure that the current hope for ‘mass politics’ does not end up in the usual leftist approach of preaching to the masses, but in new working class initiatives. We are eager to hear your comments on our efforts. We want to collaborate with any comrades who are looking for new forms of class politics in mass workplaces and industries. 

The post Vital Signs no.5 is out! – Thoughts on the party first appeared on Angry Workers.

In order to guide our day-to-day political activity and medium-term organisational strategies we need a general understanding of what a working class revolution in the 21st century could look like and what the immediate steps of transformation from a capitalist to a communist mode of production are.

In the current moment, the chaos and drift towards destruction of the existing system forces a lot of people to reconsider the question of transformation and alternatives. These theories are closely tied to their practice. People who predict a collapse rather than a social revolution propose ‘leftist prepping’, people who believe that companies like Walmart already contain the basic framework for a socialist planned economy propose the nationalisation under a leftist government.  

For comrades who assume that the ‘emancipation of the working class must be the deed of the workers themselves’ there are fewer theoretical elaborations out there. Those that have been circulated recently, such as ‘The Contours of the World Commune’ or ‘Forest and Factory’, are influenced by ‘The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’, written in the early 1930s by the Group of International Communists (GIC). The thorough and systematic argumentation of the text still makes it the main reference point and a theoretical basis for new initiatives. 

The text was written as a response to the situation in the Soviet Union, where after a failed chaotic attempt to introduce a money-free economy during war communism, the state re-introduced both money and wage labour. Given that the state had systematically undermined the power of workers’ councils, it lacked input from the immediate sphere of production, which led to a planning system from above that was not only exploitative and oppressive, but also ineffective. Despite all propaganda, the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat had turned into a dictatorship over the proletariat spread political despair amongst worker communists around the globe.

On the other hand, and this might be even more fruitful for the debate within our milieu, the comrades criticise the alternatives to central planning that have been formulated by libertarian communists and anarcho-syndicalists. The GIC criticises the libertarian idea of random take-overs of factories and the idea of localised self-management, which then, somehow, has to form a federal structure of decision-making. The anarcho-syndicalists get the stick for their egomaniacal thinking that the new society will be structured through the industrial unions of their own organisation.   

For the comrades the crux of the matter with both the state communist and the libertarian communist economic models is that they hinge on personal decision-making. In the Soviet Union economic planning is done by members of central commissions from the top, which disempowers the producers. In the libertarian communist version the decision-making by local assemblies and factory councils will either not join up to a social whole, or re-create a libertarian version of a federalised bureaucracy. 

Instead they propose a de-personalised system of general principles in the form of labour-time accounting. Every individual and every productive enterprise relates to the social production process through a transparent flow, or exchange, of labour-time. This form of open book-keeping can then be the basis for social decision-making, e.g. do we reduce our working hours now or do we work more over the short-term in order to build certain infrastructures that can help us reduce working hours even more in five years time. They claim that this de-personalised system solves the tension between autonomy and individual needs on one side, and the general interest and need for social planning on the other.

I think the text is still the main reference point for our debate for a good reason. It is non-utopian, in the sense that it derives its communist principles from the material conditions that are already given through the process of concentration and socialisation of labour in capitalism. I have two main criticisms of the text:

Firstly, rather than principles of communist production the text describes principles of circulation. It seems that for the GIC a ‘communist mode of production’ is mainly characterised through the absence of the capitalist forms of circulation, namely commodities and money, and a change in the formal ownership. In the text, workers are given an equal amount of labour time vouchers, but they still seem to be attached to either manual or intellectual jobs. It remains unclear whether the comrades think that the material form of production itself has to change, e.g. the various forms of division of labour (intellectual vs. manual, town vs. countryside, production vs. reproduction) or the form of technology. With Marx we can say that these material divisions are the main reason why capital or money, which are products of social labour, can appear as an alien, self-sustaining power. A communist mode of production would have to change the division of labour fundamentally in order to create the material basis for a true participation of everyone in the social process of decision making. If I am reduced to a particular repetitive job, I might have a formally equal ‘right’ to take part in wider decision making processes, but I will always lack the actual insights to do so. 

Secondly, the text remains opaque about the question of how to come to wider political decisions, e.g. of how to deal with conflicts between particular and general interests. The fact that a political class has taken power over workers in the Soviet Union seems to push them into thinking that you can solve the issue of political power by delegating social decisions to an ‘economic’ system of measurement and circulation, based on a new legal system. Not only does this seem to perpetuate the bourgeois division between the political and the economic sphere, it also seems to reproduce a certain fetish of the independent power of ‘the movement of things’ and laws. This derives, as a consequence, from their lack of clarity concerning the need for actual changes of the form of production. If I can’t explain why workers have actual control over a production process, e.g. because the strict division between manual and intellectual has been abolished, then I have to give them a legal right to do so. If wider society has no actual control over what is happening within an enterprise, e.g. because there is a rotation of workers between various production processes, then I have to resort to the legal right of access. The problem is that these legal rights stand on sandy ground if they are not expressions of actual human activity. 

In this sense the text reflects the debates of its time: how can economic planning not only be effective, but also maintain individual freedom? How can you, for example, encourage a large number of people, if that should be necessary after the revolution, to shift from their marketing job in front of flat screens to some hands-on work on tomato plantations? It seems that similar to the bourgeois theoreticians who they quote, prominently amongst them Ludwig von Mises, they hope that a certain ‘invisible hand’ of labour-time accounting can solve the puzzle. Given the two alternatives they see, the dictatorship of the supreme council or anarchist bricolage, this hope is understandable.

I think their model can serve as a general framework for a transitional phase after the destruction of the bourgeois state and the money economy, while the political focus has to be on the subsequent material transformation of the global production system. We will need an accurate system of bookkeeping in order to understand what productive legacy we have inherited and in order to discuss future social priorities. At the same time, the labour time accounting system has some in-built risks of becoming either a draining bureaucratic effort or a low-level economic fetish that might make people believe that they don’t have to take on certain things head-on politically. In the following I want to exemplify some of the arguments, using quotes from the text.

General conceptsAutonomy vs. social interestIndividual labour time and individual consumptionAccounting problemsImpact on consciousnessRevolution and transition

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General concepts

There is a certain vagueness when it comes to the use of ‘economic’ and ‘political’:

“So, this book can never replace this class struggle. It only wants to express economically what will happen politically.” (p.15)

It seems that the comrades equate ‘political’ with an external force and ‘economic’ with the level of working class influence. While this is true for capitalist relations, it seems that they reproduce this distinction when talking about a post-capitalist social formation:

“Since working time is the measure for the distribution of social products, the entire distribution falls outside any "politics".” (p.216)

In order to defend the ‘economic sphere’ and thereby workers’ autonomy from the possibility of political domination or the necessity of personal intervention, they describe the system of labour time accounting as a kind of self-regulating entity:

“The objective course of operational life decides itself how much product is returned to the production system and how much each employee receives for consumption. It is the self-movement of operational life.” (p.216 - emphasis by GIC)

“We are not "inventing" a "communist system". We only examine the conditions under which the central category - the average working hour in society - can be introduced. If this is not possible, then the exact relationship of producer to total product can no longer be maintained, then the distribution is no longer determined by the objective course of the production apparatus, then we get a distribution by persons to persons, then producers and consumers can no longer determine the course of the operational life, but then this is shifted to the dictatorial power of the "central organs", then the state enters the operational life with "democracy", then state capitalism is inevitable.” (p.83)

“In the association of free and equal producers, the control of production is not carried out by persons or instances, but it is guided by the public registration of the factual course of operational life. That is, production is controlled by reproduction.” (p.253 - emphasis by GIC)

As already mentioned, the GIC does not analyse how the form of production itself creates the domination of capital, nor do they base the control of workers over the communist production process on a material change. This means that the control – either by capital, or by the workers – is primarily explained by a legal right:

“The right of disposal over the means of production, exercised by the ruling class, brings the working class into a relationship of dependence on capital.” (p.22)

“This abolition can only consist in the abolition of the separation of work and the work product, that the right of disposal over the work product and therefore also over the means of production is again given to the workers.” (p.26 - emphasise by GIC)

“The abolition of the market is in the Marxist sense nothing more than the result of the new legal relations.” (p.206)

According to GIC the working class has to impose, through a political act, a new legal order and economic principles that make further political interventions unnecessary. Perhaps in a transitional period, when the production process is still largely determined by its capitalist heritage, such kind of ‘guiding principles’ are necessary for a general orientation and in order to stabilise reproduction. In the long run it will be too weak a foundation to base the control of producers just on a legal declaration and an egalitarian system of distribution.

Autonomy vs. social interest

The main social agents in terms of decision-making that the text refers to are the ‘operational organisations’, something like company councils, and ‘consumer cooperatives’. The GIC says that not the formal ownership of the means of production is decisive for the question of the emancipation of the producers, but who decides about the product of labour.

“It is not some Supreme Economic Council, but the producers themselves, who must have the disposal of the work product through their operational organizations.” (p.55)

“After this preliminary orientation on our topic, in which we have identified as characteristics of communist operational life the self-management by the operational organizations with an exact relationship from producer to product based on working time accounting…” (p.73, emphasis by GIC)

At the same time GIC is aware of the problem of self-management in the classical sense, meaning that workers ‘own’ their company and their product and ‘trade’ it on the market. 

“The type of syndicalism that seeks "free" disposal of operation must, therefore, be seriously combated.” (p.81)

They are adamant that the operational organisations don’t own their company, but that they produce for society and that the labour accounting system forces them to balance the books: they have to show wider society how much they have consumed in terms of social labour time (raw material, machines, living labour) and how much they have produced. Although there is no buying and selling there are transparent ‘exchanges’ of labour time. 

“Thus, as a compelling demand of the proletarian revolution, it turns out that all operational organizations are obliged to calculate for the products produced by them how much socially average working time they have taken up in production, and at the same time to pass on their product according to this "price" to the other operations or to the consumers. (...) ‘They are given the right’ (corrected translation) to receive the same amount of social work in the form of other products in order to be able to continue the production process in the same way.” (p.57)

In the Marxist sense, however, the new legal relationship is that the operations belong to the community. Machines and raw materials are social goods controlled by the workers and entrusted to the workers responsible for production management. This directly means that the community must also have control over the proper management of its products. However, libertarian communism firmly rejects such control, since the workers are then again "no bosses in their own house". (p.86)

“In the association of free and equal producers based on the calculation of working hours, control is of a completely different nature, because we are dealing with different legal relationships here. The workers receive the buildings, machines, and raw materials from the community to produce new goods for the community. Each operational unit thus forms a collective legal entity which is responsible to the community for its management." (p.252 - emphasis by GIC)

As seen earlier, the mere referral to ‘new legal relationships’ when it comes to the relationship of the community to the operational organisations is weak – the community and the productive sphere will have to merge in much more material forms, e.g. rotation of jobs, in order to guarantee control.

This leaves at least two questions open: what does the autonomy of these main organisations of the working class actually consist of and how does society decide about wider social aims, such as the expansion of production.

The first question of the degree of autonomy is difficult to answer, and the comrades of GIC do not help us much. For example, they don’t even mention an ‘ideal size’ for the operational organisations, despite the fact that this is decisive. In terms of transparency and social control, operational organisations could clearly be too big. If a single organisation would include various production steps, for example like old car plants did (from steel rolling to rubber production) then we only see one large number of labour time going in and one coming out. In a way capitalism has a similar issue, for example with companies like the NHS with 1.4 million employees. For managers to have more control over effectiveness and productivity they introduced an ‘internal market’ in the early 1990s. Now every department had to ‘buy’ services from other departments. This increased the control of managers, but it also bloated the bureaucracy – allegedly 10% of labour within the NHS is just due to the additional tasks of organising intra-company transactions. It is not that communism according to the GIC’s principles would be free from this problem. The smaller the units, the more transactions have to be recorded and the larger the social ‘expenditure’ on unproductive accounting labour. The issue is that the work process actually remains exactly the same, it’s just a question where you draw an ‘accounting boundary’. But these are not ‘economic’ questions, in the end they are a question of political control – and it seems that GIC wants to hide this question behind a seemingly impersonal system, similar to the seemingly impersonal force of the market.

“It is certainly a bitter irony that bourgeois economists, in particular, have made good progress in the science of communism, unless unintentionally. When it appeared that the downfall of capitalism had come within reach and communism seemed to conquer the world by storm, Max Weber and Ludwig Mises began their criticism of this communism, whereby of course first and foremost Hilferding’s "General Cartel", that is Russian communism, had to suffer.” (p.78)

We can later on see how this ‘non-capitalist market’ impacts on the consciousness even of the authors of the text.

The second question on who makes the wider social decisions is kind of fudged in the text. In general, the ‘system of book-keeping’ seems to be self-regulatory, with the occasional nudge from the operational organisations, a kind of cybernetic entity. As a side note, I don’t think it is by chance that the council communist tendency had a fair share of astronomers in the past and software programmers in the present, people who appreciate closed systems. But the comrades are aware that somehow wider decisions have to be made. So they finally introduce on page 220 a kind of social authority, the ‘general congress of works councils’ – pretty much out of the blue, without further explanation or mentioning:

“However, the expansion of the operational unit can not take place arbitrarily, as in this case there can be no question of a social production system. The general congress of works councils will, therefore, have to set a certain general standard within which the expansion must take place. For example, congress can stipulate that the operational unit may not be  expanded by more than 10% of the means of production and raw materials. This simple decision will then regulate the entire economic life as far as the expansion of the operational units is concerned… without the producers becoming dependent on a central economic authority.” (p.220 - emphasis by GIC)

This council also has the say when it comes to wider decisions, such as the construction of railways:

“This kind of expansion of production absorbs a significant proportion of the social product, from which it follows that an important part of the discussions at the economic congresses of the worker's counsels (sic) must deal with the questions to what extent these works should be initiated and which ones are the most urgent.” (p.225)

Fair enough, it is not surprising that the GIC assumes that it will need some more centralised institutions in order to come to wider social decisions, but at the same time their idea that a combination of cybernetic book-keeping and rank-and-file organisations can form an alternative to Soviet Union style planning relied on their absence:

“In our considerations, we have consistently adhered to the economic laws. As far as the organizational structure was concerned, we only referred to the operational organizations and cooperatives.” (p.284)

After having taken the ‘general councils’ out of the picture again, they introduce a ‘centre’ a couple of pages later:

“From general social accounting, however, economic life is an uninterrupted whole, and we have a center from which production, although not controlled and managed, can undoubtedly be monitored.” (p.288)

This means that the relation between ‘general council’ and ‘centre’ on one hand and the autonomy of operational organisations remains undefined. They seem to see the problem, too, and use ‘legal rights’ to guarantee, or fudge, that autonomy:

“In any case, it is essential that the operational organizations ensure that they have the right to extend if this is necessary to meet demand.” (p.222 - emphasis by GIC)

Individual labour time and individual consumption 

In other left-communist criticisms of the ‘Principles’ one main focus has been the fact that they link individual labour time to individual consumption levels. The criticism has been that this would sustain a ‘coercion to work’ or value production. I don’t think it would sustain value production in any exploitative or alienating sense and I don’t think that it is wrong to encourage everyone to do their share of work. My problem with the text’s strong focus on individual consumption is that it seems to take the previously mentioned bourgeois economists at face value, who tell us that individual consumption and needs are society’s main driving force. The GIC comrades transfer this onto the communist society:

“The process of growth from "taking according to needs", moves within fixed limits and is a conscious action of society. In contrast, the speed of growth is mainly determined by the "level of development" of consumers. The faster they learn to economize with the social product, i.e., not to consume it unnecessarily, the faster the distribution will be socialized.” (p.180)

This means that social ‘effectiveness’ is determined by consumption, rather than by an increase in social productivity, e.g. through an explosion of creativity and new forms of collaboration. 

“The needs are, therefore, the driving force and the guideline of communist production. Or, as we can also say, production is geared to "demand".” (p.211 - emphasis by GIC)

While communism, unlike capitalism, is not ‘production for production’s sake’, we can still expect that new needs and dynamics will primarily emerge from a new creative cooperation amongst people, rather than their changed consumption patterns. Their focus on consumption matches their neglect of the question how production must change in concrete terms in order to become a communist mode of production.

The ‘system’ cannot replace direct social engagement

The discussion whether the individual labour time accounting enforces an ‘individual coercion to work’ does not seem so interesting to me, the question is rather, if they are not avoiding the issue of coercion by transferring it onto an economic dynamic! “I won’t get involved if the other guy is a slacker, the voucher system will do it.” I am not sure what is more communist, if a collective tells individual members to get their act together or to leave this task to an apparatus. And the apparatus will only register the time worked, but if your comrade pisses about for an hour and wants to have it counted, you will still have to tell them. We could also argue the other way around. Do we want to encourage that particular people can work loads of ‘overtime’ in order to be able to ‘afford’ a particularly luxurious diet to which they invite selected members of the collective in order to improve their social status? Again, I think this is a secondary matter. More important is the fact that through the individual form of consumption, a possible lack of social productivity is not mainly experienced as a collective issue, but as a lack of individual purchasing power.

Workforces have no interest in productivity increases

But perhaps more interesting than thinking about individual behaviour would be to discuss what impact the system might have on an entire workforce. The system of ‘payment by labour time’ means that a workforce, if it would continue to exist as a separate entity, has no interest in increasing productivity: they are paid by the hour, not by output. The only way that the GIC comrades address this issue is by ‘comparison’ (competition) – using the example of three different workplaces that all produce shoes, unit 1 and 3 producing more productively than unit 2:

“If the shoes are charged with 3.18 hours in consumption, then the operational units 1 and 3 have hours "over" in the accounting, which correspond to the "deficit" in the accounts of unit 2.” (p.136)

The question here is if it will be mainly social pressure that will force the workers of unit 2 to produce within the average productivity range or whether the ‘deficit’ in the account will exert the pressure – it is unclear what that ‘deficit’ means exactly. The next question would obviously be whether productivity can be compared like that and what would happen if there are no comparable units.

The division between simple and complex labour persists

As mentioned, when it comes to individual labour the main issue is not necessarily that it is paid differently, but that some people are supposed to sweep roads all day, while others develop machinery. The comrades criticise sharply that workers receive different amounts of money or working time vouchers for the work they are doing, but otherwise they mainly appeal that skilled workers should not look down on unskilled workers – instead of demanding that communism does away with this division:

“We are familiar with this ideology, which makes the skilled look contemptuously at the unskilled (...) a doctor is not a garbage collector. The extent to which the workers change this ideology in the course of the revolution remains to be seen.” (p.152)

“The working class must fight with the greatest energy against such a view and demand the same share of social wealth for all.” (p.117)

It also ignores the issue of how to counter the tendency of intellectual workers to blackmail post-revolutionary society to pay them more, due to dependency on their ‘expertise’ (for example surgeons in Russia or Cuba etc.). If I don’t want to bribe them with extra-vouchers I need a different plan to collectivise their knowledge.

Accounting problems

The claim of the GIC is that for the labour time accounting system to be transparent and allow everyone to take part in the planning of production it must ‘add up’, meaning, every transaction of labour time, either within production chains or of final consumption, has to be recorded. I wonder whether a) the aim of ‘balancing the books’ can get in the way of social needs and b) whether the recording of transactions is actually possible given the complexity of social interactions.

“And since it is one of the "lay idea" of capitalism as well as of communism, when one believes that goods can be transferred without charging, the receiving operational unit must "charge" the incoming goods against the supplying operational unit.” (p.185)

Perhaps, in order to guarantee social reproduction, a particular enterprise (perhaps agriculture, perhaps mining) requires an enormous input of social labour time, but cannot ‘balance the books’, meaning that it will always have the exact amount of ‘hours in the bank’ in order to continue production. For the GIC this is the main form of social control: you have to produce within your means, because the system has an inbuilt justice of ‘equal exchange’ – but does that actually work out? Again, it is good to have a transparent public accounting system that manages to allocate labour and resources – but the main issue will still be the political debate: Should we ‘substitute’ this or that enterprise, because it is socially necessary? Should we confront the guys who work in the shoe factory, because they have been wasting resources? 

“Each company reproduces itself. And thus, the entire social economic life is reproduced.” (p.113 - emphasis by GIC)

This is of course a quite compelling logic, not too different from a market logic. But does it not also have potentially similar consequences in terms of the consciousness of workers who beaver away within the companies: “As long as our books look alright and we won’t get a bollocking in the general council, things are cool. Why bother about the wider social production cycle?”.

There are further tendencies and factors which make an accurate accounting more and more difficult, some of which have been mentioned in other critiques, e.g. the question how to account time spent on innovations that impact on millions of products, such as the introduction of industrial norms. Another example is the inbuilt potential of re-creating regional unevenness in income and development:

“For example, if the workers in one district want to set up several public reading rooms, they can do so without further ado. New institutions are then added, which have a more local significance so that the necessary costs must also be borne by the district concerned. For this district, the payout factor will be changed, which has the effect of a "local tax".” (p.180)

In addition to the operational organisations and the places of final consumption here they introduce another accounting unit, the ‘district’. These districts might have their own ‘reading rooms’ but they still depend on wider social production, which will make the calculations enormously complex. But this is more than just a technical challenge, it is a political one: would workers who live in a different district, where their ‘payout factor’ is higher, not be allowed to use the reading room? What about long-term consequences, e.g. some districts or regions invested loads in education, for example reading rooms, other districts or regions just ‘spend’ all labour time on good food. Won’t that recreate social imbalances?

In response to the political decisions in the early Soviet Union to nationalise only those companies that are ‘ripe’ for socialism they say:

“In the Marxist sense, there are no "ripe" or "not ripe" enterprises, but society as a whole is ripe for communism.” (p.34)

Are they not avoiding a thorny issue that sneaks into their own model? What about the question, which enterprises produce a ‘free’ good and which ones (still) have to produce in exchange for labour time vouchers? Is that not also a question of ‘being ripe’ for a different level of social production, meaning, some companies are ‘ripe’ for a production of ‘everyone according to their needs’, while others have to stick to production in return for vouchers?

“With the growth of communism, this type of operation [enterprise] will probably be expanded more and more, so that also food supply, personal transport (this is also individual consumption!), housing service, etc., in short: the satisfaction of general needs, will come to stand on this ground.” (p.178)

Impact on the consciousness

At various points in the text the authors say that there is no value produced in communism, but that the measure of labour-time embodied in products has similarities to value. In order not to use the word they call it ‘production time’. 

“In fact, this is a transformation of concepts, as we have seen previously in terms of value, income, and expenditure, etc. And just as language will preserve all these old names for the time being, it will also preserve the name "market". (...) The abolition of the market can, therefore, be understood to mean that it continues to exist under communism, according to its external appearance.” (p.208 - emphasis by GIC)

That all this is not only about semantics – whether to call things ‘exchange’ or flow – or appearances can be seen in the following examples, where it seems that the capitalist logic still rules the minds of the authors. About whether a company hands out their products in exchange for vouchers or without vouchers they say:

“Of course, it must always be considered in advance whether such a distribution for a particular sector does not involve too great a sacrifice for society.” (p.178)

It is interesting that they call it ‘sacrifice’, as the goods and services that are handed out without exchange of labour vouchers are as much based on social labour as those who aren’t. In this sense society doesn’t have to ‘sacrifice’ anything, e.g. people don’t have to work more or tighten their belts, society has only less of a control over consumption. Meaning, the ideology or consciousness of “oh, this is given for free, but someone surely has to pay for this” also remains in the heads of the authors. This seems also to be the case when they write about ‘hardship funds’ for emergencies, such as natural catastrophes:

“Under communism, this type of hardship will have to be borne by the whole of society, so it is natural that a "general fund" should be set up with the help of the payout factor. The speed with which this stockpiling is carried out is in the hands of the councils, which must determine the amount of this fund at the congresses.” (p.227)

How would this ‘stock-piling’ actually work? Do they talk about producing additional rescue vehicles? Do they say that each district should calculate a margin that in case of an emergency a certain amount of labour can be withdrawn from general production? Both would not really constitute a ‘fund’. So it seems that they think that a kind of accumulated ‘fund’ of labour-time could sit somewhere that could be tapped into in times of an emergency – again, this is a capitalist logic of money accumulation.

To give another example of how an external ‘accounting system’ can negatively change the consciousness of workers, I will talk about our hospital. From the Emergency Department (ED), where patients are admitted, to the discharge process on the wards, there is a constant bombardment with ‘targets’: patients should not stay in ED longer than a certain amount of time; they should be ‘treated’ according to certain ‘evidence based’ standards, e.g. official sepsis screening time-frames; they should be discharged once certain criteria are met. All this is not mediated through value, money or profits, although ‘saving money’ is a compulsion in the background. Workers, in particular workers in ‘responsible’ positions, sometimes focus more on these figures, the ‘patient flow’, than the concrete conditions of patients. The internal ‘accounting system’ of the NHS creates its own alienation.

Revolution and transition

Their ‘economistic’ understanding of workers’ power also influences the way in which they describe the revolutionary period:

“The economic dictatorship of the Proletariat -  Finally, we must say a few words about the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship is self-evident to us and does not really need special treatment, because the introduction of communist economic life is nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (p.273 - emphasis by GIC)

“It is also a dictatorship which is not carried out by bayonet, but by the economic laws of the movement of communism. It is not "the state" that carries out this economic dictatorship, but something more powerful than the state: the laws of economic movement.” (p.276)

We can agree that a working class revolution is not primarily a civil war which is won militarily. It is true that the main weapon of the working class is the social production process itself, although this is different from ‘the laws of economic movement’. Still, there seem to be certain white spots when it comes to the necessity of concerted political intervention even after the revolution has succeeded. Here the main challenge won’t be transparent book-keeping, that might be the easiest part.

For any revolutionary strategy we need to know which social and material changes can be achieved during a class movement and revolutionary process itself and which changes can only take place when the working class has taken power. We have to know what can be done within the first 100 days of proletarian dictatorship and what needs a longer period.

A revolution in terms of active struggle with the class enemy is necessarily a temporary affair, there is a certain time-window within which the question of power has to be solved. It is true that the revolutionary process itself will dismantle a lot of capitalist divisions within the production process, e.g. in terms of socialisation of knowledge or changes from small-scale domestic reproduction to collective forms. We can call this ‘communisation’, but it is limited in terms of scope.

Other changes will necessarily need much longer than the immediate period of revolutionary upheaval, due to their material nature. This means that we will deal with the material legacy of capitalism – and the potential that these material structures, which still form part of our social reproduction, re-impose social hierarchies. To name a few:

a) The division between town and countryside. It will probably need a generation or more in order to dismantle the large urban concentrations and to re-populate the countryside – in a way which does not reproduce rural poverty and idiocy. Even more so if this process is not supposed to have a character like the Great Leap Forward etc.

b) The division between different regional stages of development. Capitalist hierarchy produces and sustains itself by regional disparity in the development of the forces of production. This also includes regions that are naturally blessed by good climate or fertile soil.

c) The reparation of nature that has been exhausted by the capitalist mode of production and the extra labour due to the move away from fossil fuels.

In the actual moment of revolutionary upheaval there is a lot of enthusiasm for social change, but it is not guaranteed that this enthusiasm will be generalised and expanded forever. To change the material conditions mentioned above will require an extra-amount of social labour during a period of transition. 

Looking at historical examples it is not unlikely that, e.g. regions that are privileged in terms of their inherited productive structure or land fertility will be less inclined to make an extra-effort to even-out global disparity; or that in order to guarantee a better living standard short-term, necessary reparations of nature are postponed and future generations left to deal with it. It is not absurd to assume that it will need a strong internationalist communist force and perspective, that galvanised during the time of revolution, to ‘encourage’ that these necessary material changes are undertaken, with the aim to create the basis for a global human community.

The open question is what form this communist force takes and how it relates to wider society. I don’t imagine a Communist Party in the old sense nor a workers’ state. I assume that the challenge will be to instill a communist core in those industries that are primarily concerned when it comes to the material transition: large scale manufacturing, transport, energy, agriculture etc.. It will be this central working class that will have to pull the rest of society through this period of transition – not because workers in these industries are by and in themselves prone to have a higher degree of consciousness, but because these industries are structurally the most socialised and global. If the communist project has a material base, it is there – though it will also always need external proletarian pressure to socialise.

The text by the GIC does not really prepare us for these political tasks. It is a valuable framework to stabilise social reproduction, but it runs the risk to make workers believe that with the establishment of an equal system of distribution the ‘deed is done’ and no persistent political struggle for an internationalist, feminist and sustainable construction of communism is necessary even years after the revolution. Our task would be to debate and update the text and integrate it into a wider political strategy.

The post Thoughts on the ‘Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’ first appeared on Angry Workers.

This summary was written for an international summer camp in August, feel free to send us comments.

1) What major strike movements have there been in the country where you live, in the last 12 months? 

There were very few outstanding strikes, primarily smaller disputes for regrading low paid workers within the NHS, such as the 100 day strike of phlebotomists in Gloucester. The main focus for the trade union movement is the bin workers strike in Birmingham against pay cuts, which has been going on since March 2025. There have been several ‘mass pickets’, which mobilised trade union activists and left groups from around the country. The strike becomes a political issue between the left-wing trade union movement and the governing Labour Party, e.g. the striking union Unite has suspended the membership of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayners. The union also voted to “re-examine its relationship” with Labour over the issue, in a sign of growing divide between the union and the party who have historically worked hand-in-hand. The actual strength of the strike is not talked about much, there have been short-term occupations of scabbing temp agencies, but these actions seemed symbolic. A similar bin strike is happening in Sheffield, where Unite represents a third of the workforce.

2) Have there been any other major protest movements? What was the cause? 

The main protest movement of the last year were the riots against asylum seekers, which are currently flaring up again. The media give these protests a lot of air time, perhaps in order to create a social atmosphere which allows the government to increase the amount of anti-migration raids, as Labour deported many more migrants than the Tory government, and to restrict migration laws, e.g. there is a new deal with France to curb boat migration and the work visa regime has been changed, you now need to work 10 instead of previously 5 years in order to apply for citizenship. At the same time these riots are more than a media show, they are a new composition of far-right organisers, local lower working class with many women and children involved and a strata of self-employed building workers or small entrepreneurs. The riots mainly happen in the poorest parts of the country.

Another round of protest happened after the government announced to cut the Personal Independence Payments, a benefit for disabled people. These protests were mainly organised by loose networks of anarchist adjacent and/or self-organised groups of disabled people, but they were largely unable to create wider connections to different sections of the class. The government did have to reverse the bulk of these cuts though, also partly due to conflicts within the parliamentary Labour party. 

Finally there are the Palestine protests with the repression against Palestine Action (PA) – after PA broke into an RAF base and spray painted on a military plane the government have “proscribed” PA as a “terrorist organisation”, not only banning the group but enacting a law that means anyone who the state deems to be “supporting” the organisation is at risk of being jailed for up to 11 years. Since then dozens of people have been arrested at pro-PA actions, but the charges are still unclear. Again, this level of repression hasn’t been seen under recent Tory governments.

3) Are there any economic or political developments in the country where you live that you should be aware of with regard to upcoming social protests? 

There are the usual post-Brexit problems of achieving trade deals, first of all with the US. It seems that recent participation in US led attacks in Yemen and other ‘expressions of submission’ resulted in a lowering of US tariffs for UK products. The UK government is in a fix, as the economic growth is dismal and new public investments would have to be financed by tax increases. Currently there is a lot of talk about ‘billionaires leaving the country’, which is the base for one of the main policies of the Reform UK economic program after their land-slide victory at recent local elections, breaking a century of two-party rule. They suggest a ‘one off tax’ for the rich of £250,000, which is lower than the current tax rate over time – and the money will be paid into the bank accounts of ‘the poorest’. Reform UK hops to win the next election with this populist measure: tax reduction for both the richest and the small self-employed builder and some hand-outs for the proles. The inflation has crept back up to 3.6% (CPI) despite lowering interest rates, and at the same time the labour market has cooled. UK economy has been stagnant for the past 12 months.

4) What distinguishes the situation of class struggles in the country you live from other countries?

First of all the post-Brexit situation and the inability of the UK state to transform itself into the ‘low tax de-regulated tech lab’ that they would like the UK to be. The result is that the UK economy is still very dependent on international finance markets, it has the highest levels of de-industrialisation and at the same time the highest levels of migration in the EU. The 2021 census found 10 million residents were born outside England and Wales, representing 16.8% of all inhabitants. In comparison, 38 million people living within the EU were born outside it, representing 8.5% of the population. This creates a peculiar social tension, the property market plays a huge role for peoples’ income – either due to high rent or mortgage or as small landlords – and at the same time the state has to import labour from Indonesia and Nepal to work in agriculture and lacks the native know-how to finish large-scale infrastructure programs.

5) Would you like to add ONE more thing that could be relevant for future conflict dynamics?

Currently most of the political debate evolves around the question of parliamentary party politics: what would a likely Reform UK government change? When will the leaders finally announce the formation of a new left party? Behind the scenes a swamp of micro-parties, factions, personalities, union leaders etc. fights over the right moment and the right pitch to form this new party, while thousands watch and dream of a ‘democratic mass party’. It is most probable that in the usual style of the UK left, this new project will create short-term excitement and bring hundreds of people together in highly publicised self-celebrations, before internal interest fights and lack of cohesion will cool things down again.

The post Short summary of the current situation of struggles in the UK first appeared on Angry Workers.

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This summary was written for an internationalist summer camp in France in August 2025, comments welcome. Hopefully we will see the development of a working class anti-militarism, as expressed by small groups of workers in Munich or Grenoble. We encourage fellow workers to engage in a collective analysis of the impact that the current drive for militarism has in their sectors.

Since Trump’s tariff war, the UK state is even more desperate to secure its crumbling economic base by showing off as a minor military partner, both to the EU, when it concerns Ukraine, and to the US, when it concerns the Middle-East. The focus of the latter was to obtain a favourable trade agreement by submission.

*** Current military involvement

In Ukraine, the Starmer government continues the previous Tory government’s hawkish stand. Shortly after the war started, Boris Johnson, as an unofficial representative of the UK, put pressure on Zelensky ‘not to give in’ and, as the UK is one of the main financial supporters of Ukraine, significantly undermined the peace talks. Starmer was one of the first European statesmen to announce the possibility of deploying troops of a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Ukraine in future, while the UK military continues to train Ukrainian personnel. The UK pushes for a NATO revival, while the EU is debating its own standing army. There are also separate defence agreements between UK and Germany in the making and current negotiations between the UK and France on nuclear cooperation – and how ‘to defend the common borders against migrants’.

In the Middle East, the UK army under Sunak took part in the US bombardment of Houthi positions in January 2024 in ‘self-defence’. Under Starmer’s leadership, the UK has continued spy flights for Israel, allowed the US military to operate through its Cyprus airbase, and launched fighter jets in support of Israel during Iran’s recent strikes. (as a footnote: The Starmer leadership used the ‘fidelity’ to Israel and Corbyn’s ‘outdated pacifism’ to purge the party of its left fringe – this partly explains the particularly aggressive tone of the government’s militarism.)

*** Ideological militarisation

In June 2025, at a low point of popularity, the government fired up the war propaganda machine. Starmer announced that the UK’s armed forces must move to “war-fighting readiness” over the coming years, the UK faces a “more serious and immediate” threat than anytime since the Cold War, and “every citizen must play their part“. UK foreign affairs adviser Fiona Hill (previous advisor to Trump) said on the front page of main UK newspapers, that the “UK is at war with Russia”. The head of Britain’s armed forces Adm. Tony Radakin warned that the world stands at the cusp of a “third nuclear age”. These scenarios are meant to shift public opinion – in a survey from early 2024, only 7% of the 18 to 40 year olds said they would volunteer for the army if a world war broke out; 21% would not volunteer, but serve if conscripted; and 38% would refuse to be conscripted.

*** Defence spending

In February 2025, Starmer announced: 

“the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War. (…)  We must use the process of getting to 3% of our national income spent on defence to fundamentally rebuild British industry, use our investment in military spending to create new jobs and apprenticeships in every part of the country. And that’s why last night I announced a deal that perfectly symbolises the new era. A partnership with Ukraine that allows them to use £1.6 billion of UK export finance to buy 5,000 air defence missiles manufactured in Belfast. That means UK jobs, UK skills, UK finance pulling together for our national interest, putting Ukraine in the strongest possible position…” 

As part of this new strategy, the government announced a £1.5 billion investment in at least six new munitions and energetics factories, which it claims will support over 1,800 skilled jobs in the UK defence sector (HM Government, 2025). In addition the UK wants to build up to 12 attack submarines as part of AUKUS programme and a £15 billion investment set out for the UK’s nuclear warhead programme. Allegedly 400,000 jobs in Britain are attached to the arms industry. Unsurprisingly, all trade unions are unapologetically in favour of the increase in spending. The biggest union across the manufacturing sector, Unite, titled their press release in February 2025: 

“Increased defence spending welcome but promises on UK jobs must be real”.

These plans have to be seen on the background of a teetering UK economy. In April 2025 the government passed a ‘Steel Act’ to nationalise parts of the British steel industry – none of which is actually not that “British” anymore, as there is significant ownership of Indian and Chinese companies. For example, the Act wanted to prevent a Chinese company from closing down a blast furnace in Lincolnshire through nationalisation, to defend ‘national interest’. There have been previous disputes around Chinese investments, amongst others in micro-chip, battery and power plants, with US politicians intervening to prevent further economic ties.

In that sense the picture that Draghi (ex-president of the European Central Bank) paints for Europe also applies to the UK: 

“Of all the major economies, Europe is the most exposed to [geopolitical] shifts. We are the most open: our trade-to-GDP ratio exceeds 50 percent, compared with 37 percent in China and 27 percent in the United States. We are the most dependent: we rely on a handful of suppliers for critical raw materials and import over 80 percent of our digital technology. We have the highest energy prices: EU companies face electricity prices that are 2–3 times higher than those in the United States and in China. We are severely lagging behind in new technologies. And we are the least ready to defend ourselves: only ten member states spend more than or equal to 2 percent of GDP on defense, in line with NATO commitments.”

*** Social contradictions

To hit the 3% rearmament target, the UK state would have to find an extra £13bn. Currently, the government had to perform various U-turns when it came to the austerity measures that would contribute to the financing of rearmament, e.g. initially they wanted to give NHS staff only 2.8% pay increase, but they topped it up to 3.6%, and the planned cuts of disability allowance have been softened after significant protests. The peace movement itself is relatively weak, but there is considerable discontent with the austerity measures and with the intensification of legal repression against protests, such as the declaration of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Recent surveys say that Labour would currently get only 15% of votes.

The post Short overview on the process of militarisation in the UK first appeared on Angry Workers.

We translated this article by comrades from the collective Wildcat.

‘The state of the automotive industry is one of the most visible elements of a general crisis in industry.’

On the 20th of December 2024, VW’s works council and management agreed on an austerity programme that, among other things, would result in the elimination of 35,000 jobs by 2030 – most of the jobs will be cut in ‘too expensive’ factories in Germany. The production of the VW Golf is to be moved entirely to Mexico. Job cuts are also intensifying among suppliers, and are reaching machine and plant manufacturers (Kuka Augsburg).

Mercedes wants to double the share of production in low-wage countries from 15 to 30 per cent – in Kecskemét, Hungary, costs are claimed to be 70 per cent lower than in Germany. In 2023, an hour’s work in Hungary cost 12.80 Euros, compared to 41.80 in Germany. At nine per cent, corporate tax is lower than anywhere else in the EU. In addition, Orbán subsidises Audi, BMW and Volkswagen with hundreds of millions of Euros. The country is attracting people from Kazakhstan and Mongolia to counteract the shortage of labour and rising wages.

The ‘relocation strategy’ of recent decades has led to a standstill in innovation. German car companies no longer supply technology, but have to obtain battery know-how through new partnerships with Chinese companies. On top of the massive competition from Chinese carmakers, new tariffs and other trade barriers are now emerging. As an export-oriented country, Germany is becoming less and less suitable as a sales market – minus 27 per cent for electric cars in 2024. Even in the smaller United Kingdom, more electric cars were sold last year. Yet Germany is the second largest electric car producing country after China.

Even Tesla’s ‘innovations’ are increasingly turning out to be Musk’s ‘visions’ or even frauds. After each failure, he announces a new project to keep the stock bubble from bursting. That worked well for 20 years. Now he is trying to stop the rapidly collapsing sales figures and the foreseeable economic failure with a political coup. The US government has dropped an initial lawsuit against SpaceX. Further investigations by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice against Musk’s companies are to be prevented by the shock of the mass layoffs in the civil authorities. But the ‘excessively strict regulations’, which Musk claims to be fighting against, often do not really exist (for example, in the case of fully autonomous driving in the US).

It could be a threat for Tesla (and others) that the Chinese carmaker BYD now wants to offer its assistance systems as part of the standard package. What costs several thousand dollars extra if you buy a Tesla would be included in the $9,500 BYD Seagull. If BYD’s move forces competitors to lower software prices – or to abandon paid subscription models altogether – the industry’s vision of raking in high profits through AI assistance systems will vanish into thin air.

The resistance to Musk is only just beginning. There are smaller protests happening outside of the factory floor. Under the slogan ‘Tesla Takedown,’ citizens are calling for a boycott in front of showrooms in major US cities. In view of the institutional coup by Trump/Musk and the massive job cuts across the automotive industry, mass strikes in Tesla, Volkswagen and Mercedes factories would be appropriate. But the employers’ rapid succession of blows – in Germany, but especially in the US – has left many workers in a state of shock. A brief wildcat strike by African lorry drivers in Germany in late January/early February was a small ray of hope (they were carrying loads including parts for the automotive industry) – but it shows that nothing has changed after Gräfenhausen [1] and the ‘Supply Chain Act’! [2]

When it comes to class politics, things don’t look any better for the Chinese competition: slave-like conditions and human rights violations. Most recently at the Serbian factory of the Chinese tyre company Linglong (which supplies VW) and during the conversion of a former Ford factory in Brazil that was bought by BYD.

Following a strike-happy 2023, the situation in early 2024 appeared to be as bleak as it is today,. However, more industrial disputes took place in Germany in the first half of 2024 than in previous years; at 171, there were more disputes than at any time since 2016. What’s more, the strikes lasted longer and were fought harder. In addition to wage increases, collective agreements and equal pay, workers increasingly demanded shorter working hours.

In the second half of 2024, the massive attacks by the car bosses began. Against this background, we published the following article in Wildcat 114. The editorial deadline was the 7th of December 2024.

from: Wildcat 114, Winter 2024

The auto and other crises

The ‘green transformation’ is failing and electric car sales are so low that the new car factories are making a loss. According to the coalition agreement of the ‘Ampel’ government (SPD, Green Party and the liberal FDP) in Germany, there should be 15 million electric cars on the roads by 2030. To achieve this, their share of new registrations would have to increase from 15 to 50 per cent with immediate effect – but it is falling. New ‘green jobs’ in industries are tending to decrease rather than increase. ‘Green’ start-ups are going broke. Northvolt, the flagship project of the European battery industry, has filed for bankruptcy. They can’t get the Chinese machines to work in the Swedish flagship factory.

In autumn 2024, hardly a week went by without new announcements of job cuts at all of Europe’s automotive companies and their suppliers. Bosch, Schaeffler, ZF, Magna, Continental and Thyssenkrupp are cutting tens of thousands of jobs and closing sites. Car production in Italy has collapsed, Ford has closed its factory in Saarlouis and is laying off staff in Cologne, and unemployment is soaring in the Austrian supply industry. At Volkswagen, the world’s second largest carmaker, management is overwhelming workers with bad news: in July, they announced the closure of the Audi plant in Brussels (after Audi bought the Sauber Formula 1 team in March for almost €700 million!). In September, they cancelled the ‘employment protection agreement’ introduced in 1994. This means that from July 2025, redundancies for operational reasons would be possible. The managers are demanding wage cuts of 10 per cent and want to close another three factories – this time in Germany, where VW employs 120,000 people.

As with the recent dockers‘ strikes in Hamburg, the media are supporting the employers’ attack with reports about overpaid workers and the usual references: will Wolfsburg become the new Detroit? Stuttgart the new Ruhr area? The employers are using the hullabaloo to torpedo the ‘Supply Chain Act’ as well. They are setting the agenda – and acting as if, after the closures and wage cuts, things will go back to business as usual, only with fewer workers.

Works councils and IG Metall have no alternative concept and are playing by the rules: they propose cost reductions of 1.5 billion Euros with wage restraint, flexibilisation of working hours and targeted job cuts. They are verbally radical at rallies and even organise token strikes (two hours per shift on the 2nd of December with 100,000 participants, four hours are planned for the 9th of December). The works council drivel about the ‘Volkswagen family’ is totally embarrassing. IG Metall can no longer play the role of moderniser as it did in the second half of the 20th century, because there is no longer any prospect of growth. Boosting car sales while lowering wages at the same time would only work if ‘consumers’ took out loans and got more into debt (as in the USA). Switching to the Chinese market no longer works either – quite the opposite!

The same systemic questions arise as in other industries – which products are socially desirable? How many? Who does the work? Who decides on investments? The difference is that the automotive industry is the key capitalist industry. The value added, the integration of completely different processes and workers, and the importance the automobile industry has for other sectors are greater than anywhere else. [3] The automotive industry combines mining and metallurgy (iron, steel, aluminium, etc.) with plant and tool construction, chemicals, electronics and transport. If you add road construction, service, etc., then no other industry depends on more jobs.

Cost reduction instead of conversion

Where car factories were built, a new stage of industrialisation and proletarisation began – and subsequently the struggles of car workers forced capital to develop: increase wages, hire people, automate. Many things still benefit us today: employee representation, collective agreements, safety and cleanliness standards at work, etc. But since the two ‘oil crises’ of 1973 and 1979, employers have no longer responded with ‘development’, but with globalisation and fragmentation of production. In doing so, they initially won on three counts: lower wages in newly industrialised areas, a boost in vehicle production due to the increased need for global transport, and fewer strikes due to smaller workforces. The price for this was a huge increase in environmental pollution and very complex global production and supply chains. Multinationals like VW, with over 100 factories and 600,000 employees worldwide, have emerged, along with thousands of suppliers and millions more workers. VW has to produce ten million cars a year to maintain the accumulated fixed capital and achieve the desired profit.

In 1972, the Club of Rome, which is partly financed by VW, formulated an ecological critique of mass motorisation – but it was directed against the workers’ struggles. VW itself did something completely different: it expanded. In the 1970s, VW was the first western carmaker to invest in China and the first foreign carmaker to open a factory in the USA. But by 1975, VW was in crisis, with the workforce to be reduced from 138,000 to 113,000. Most of the job cuts were handled by dishing out severance pay, with a few small departments being closed. [4]

At that time, the first plans were made – born out of the threat of factory closures – to convert production to ‘socially useful products’ (the famous ‘Lucas Plan’ in England in 1976; ‘conversion’ was discussed primarily after the First and Second World Wars and after the end of the confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact).

A final lifeline for the car industry during its death throes came from social-democratic managers. They tried to reconcile ecology, technological development and profits, while ‘including’ the workers. For example, Edzard Reuter, CEO of Daimler-Benz AG from 1987-95, promoted an ‘open corporate culture’ that would ‘feel equally responsible to the capital providers, the workforce and the environment and act accordingly’. He wanted to turn Daimler into an ‘integrated technology group’. Similarly, Daniel Goeudevert, a French car manager and member of the Club of Rome, who sat on the board of management at VW from 1991-93 and was responsible for purchasing, advocated the expansion of public transport and the development of environmentally friendly cars.

Both Reuter and Goeudevert failed. With the ‘end of history’ came a 180-degree change in strategy during the sales crisis of the 1990s. At Mercedes, Reuter’s successor Jürgen Schrempp implemented ‘lean production’. At VW, Ignacio López, who remains to this day a notorious role model for all ‘cost-killer’ managers, introduced corresponding austerity programmes in the early 1990s. He had previously ruined Opel’s quality and reputation with his cost-cutting strategies; now he pushed through that VW suppliers would sell their parts for continuously falling purchase prices. This resulted in systematic quality defects, known in the industry today as the ‘López effect’.

VW introduced the 28.8-hour week in 1994, when the crisis was already over. IG Metall agreed to a wage cut and a massive intensification of labour. As a result, fewer workers had to build more cars in less time. Together with VW and the state of Lower Saxony, IG Metall founded its own temporary employment agency (GIZ), cancelled holidays of permanent employees etc. This was the basis of the ‘employment security agreement’, which was to last for 30 years. Volkswagen built up a foreign production network with the takeovers of Seat in Spain in 1988 and Škoda in the Czech Republic in 1991, as well as the factory in Bratislava in 1994, as a threat against workers in Germany (Bentley and Lamborghini were added in 1998, later MAN, Scania, Ducati and Bugatti).

Green capitalism?

To support car sales, the EU introduced emission standards from 1992 onwards. Stricter emission rules come into force roughly every four years. The carmakers were supposed to build cleaner engines bit by bit; consumers were supposed to be persuaded to buy new cars faster by issuing driving bans on their old ‘polluting’ cars. This stabilised sales, with new car sales rising by a few hundred thousand cars each year (EU-15 sales 1993: 10.9 million; 2003: 13.8 million). Since then, the old ‘polluters’ are no longer disposed of properly, but rather they are exported to Eastern Europe and Africa, where they pollute cities and increase the number of traffic deaths. [6]

The next corporate attack came at the turn of the millennium, again at VW. The then head of HR, Social Democrat and IGM member Peter Hartz, founded subsidiaries that hired workers at lower rates. Hartz introduced the concept of the ‘breathing company’, which ‘breathes in’ workers when the order book is full and ‘exhales’ them when it is empty. Together with the management consultancy McKinsey, VW’s own temporary employment agency AutoVision was created, later Auto 5000, another subsidiary, for whose workers the inferior ‘company wage agreement II’ applied. VW core workers saw the new ones as ‘cheap competition’; there was no joint struggle against this attack. Instead, works councils at individual VW plants organised workshops to increase productivity at their own location in order to attract investment and outdo their colleagues’ locations.

With the introduction of the euro in 2002, the competition that had already developed between workers in Western and Eastern Europe and within companies was further intensified. This happened because less productive countries could no longer avoid pressure by devaluing their currencies – thus, the low German unit wage costs were able to gradually take effect and the ‘German export model’ flourished. To do this, industry had to be able to access low wages. Once again, Peter Hartz came into play: in 2004, Hartz-IV [5] was introduced – a far-reaching benefit reform that increased the pressure to work and increased poverty. This created ‘one of the most modern low-wage sectors’ in Europe, as his friend and client Gerhard Schröder was pleased to note.

In 2005, Hartz was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had sent corrupt VW works council members to brothels and on luxury holidays at the company’s expense. However, neither this nor the wildcat strike at Opel in 2004 [7] could stop the general development: in 2006, a new collective agreement made working hours more flexible at VW and subsequently in the entire metal industry – the most important measure turned out to be that the number of hours that you could either have plus or minus in your annual working hours account was increased to 400. This made it possible to avoid mass layoffs when the crisis hit in 2009; short-time working did the rest – in the end, the German automotive multinationals weathered the global crisis without strikes. In 2009, there were only two publicly visible conflicts: a hunger strike by VW contract workers against their dismissal and a short wildcat strike by Daimler workers against the relocation of a car model.

In addition, the car industry was supported by state ‘scrappage schemes’. Consultancy firms called for a ‘downsizing’ of the industry, including plant closures, to reduce overcapacity and increase profit rates. The left wanted to hold a new ‘conversion’ discussion on how to overcome the destructive car system. The core workforces of VW and other multinationals had nothing to fear and did not fight against the former, nor did they care much about the latter. Due to a huge export boom to China, everything seemed to remain the same – ‘downsizing’ or ‘conversion’ was postponed.

China!

From 2012 to 2017, EU car production rose from 12.7 to 15 million per year, and employment in the German automotive industry rose from 742,000 to 834,000. In China, the rich, politicians and parts of the taxi industry bought the expensive cars from Germany. The ‘diesel scandal’ from 2015 (in which not only VW was involved) had no major impact on operating profits, but it did help a new criminal entrepreneur to succeed: Elon Musk, who used Tesla to give his anti-union mass production regime a greenwashing.

At certain points during that period, a third of the workers in German car factories were employed through temporary agency. Three quarters of the work to manufacture a car was taken over by suppliers who paid less than the main car companies – and who, in turn, outsourced work further. Labour costs in the new (subcontractor) factories from Poland to Ukraine, Serbia to North Africa remained low compared to German levels, despite some notable strikes. [8] In addition, there were moderate wage increases for the core work-force in Germany. These were the foundations of the successful export boom – and not, for example, innovation, superior technology or the like.

From 2019, sales and employment figures began to fall (except for Tesla). In 2020, the pandemic caused a brief slump, but the corporations had their wages subsidised through short-time work benefits again, they increased the prices of new cars – and made record profits. After 2022, the carmakers’ profit rates reached the next record in 2023, at an average of 8.6 per cent. The 16 largest carmakers rake in more than 150 billion Euros in profits per year. Mercedes, BMW and VW made several billion Euros in profits each year. Instead of Reuters’ ideas of acknowledging ‘employees and the environment’, the managers bribed the upper levels of the working class with money. Time and again, there were performance bonuses of several thousand Euros for German permanent employees. They paid high dividends to shareholders and awarded themselves 200 times the wage of a skilled worker.

The multinationals passed on a large part of the cost-cutting measures to suppliers by standardising the López method: we only guarantee you to buy parts from you if you guarantee us annual cost reductions. The suppliers that were large enough not to go broke cut jobs as a result. The nearly 100,000 jobs that have been cut in the German auto industry since 2019 were largely cut at the suppliers (a large share of the jobs at Opel were cut before 2019).

Some workers suffering from cost-cutting measures were able to attract attention by voting for the far-right AfD. [9]

The crisis…

Because of ‘China’, Germany was able to increase its absolute vehicle production slightly between 2000 and 2016 (in relative terms, as a share of global production, it was already falling). This ensured a little economic growth. The same applies to Spain and Eastern European countries. In France, Italy and England, on the other hand, vehicle production fell by more than half in each of these countries over the same period. [10]

Global car sales and production have been stagnating since 2017. Since then, production in Germany has also fallen. Almost two million fewer cars were produced in 2023 compared to 2016, in total four million. The ‘green transformation’, with a mix of billions in subsidies for electric cars and bans on combustion cars, should have boosted sales and thus production again – but in contrast to the introduction of the EU emissions standards in the 1990s, the electric car project went completely pear-shaped. The charging infrastructure is lacking, the range is still limited (and decreases even further in winter when you use the heating), ununderstood chemistry instead of logical mechanics, higher weight and more tyre abrasion (fine dust!) and an even greater dependence on software. In addition, German-made electric vehicles are far too expensive. Subsidies for industrial greenfield projects in the USA are higher and energy costs are lower. And above all, the competition from China is better.

From February 2023 to February 2024, industrial production in the Eurozone fell by 6.4 per cent, and in the EU by 5.4 per cent. German GDP is shrinking, and growth rates are struggling to get above 0.1 per cent. From January to September 2024, vehicle construction fell by 6.9 per cent compared to the same period last year. This is dragging down the mechanical engineering (minus 8.5) and electrical (minus 10.7 per cent) industries with it. Investments in new machinery are declining, foreign investments are at a record low, industrial companies are cutting thousands of jobs. The increasing arms production cannot even come close to compensating for this. The share of industry in GDP is declining.

China has changed from being the saviour of the German (car) industry to its potential gravedigger: Chinese companies not only have lower labour costs but also several years of technological headstart in the production of electric cars. Not only do they dominate battery production and machine / plant engineering, but the ‘smartphone-isation of the car’ also suits them. And just like Japanese car companies, they no longer rely on full automation; the share of personnel costs in Chinese car factories is 15 percent, in Germany 10 percent. They rely on engineers instead of financial honks and on creative ideas from colleagues for process optimisation. They have understood that innovations come from workers, not from machines. Permanent training under the slogan ‘lifelong learning’ amounts to eternal employee harassment. Chinese capitalists are doing what they have been doing for decades: they are copying and radicalising existing production methods – it is unlikely that they are not aware of the ‘López effect’ – nevertheless, on the 27th of November, BYD announced that it expects its suppliers to reduce costs by 10 per cent by 2025 in order to survive in the price war on the Chinese market. There, too, sales are stagnating, and manufacturers have to divide the cake among themselves. Many Chinese brands will go broke. The Chinese market is collapsing for German manufacturers. Also on the 27th of November, VW announced that it would close its forced labour factory in Xinjiang.

The state of the automotive industry is one of the most visible elements of a general crisis in industry and an expression of over-accumulation. As long as we are hypnotised by looking at falling sales numbers and hope for ‘green’ products, we won’t realise how general the crisis is. We are experiencing the implosion of cost-cutting strategies, management-by-stress and a corporate culture fixated on stock prices. The many expensive machine systems – no matter how highly digitised, artificially intelligent and networked – do not increase productivity and do not work for small-batch luxury production. As always, the employers are trying to use the crisis to restore the relationship between necessary and surplus labour in their favour. The form in which this is happening in Germany is ‘deindustrialisation’. Well-paid industrial jobs are being cut and rebuilt in new factories in low-cost countries: VW wants to invest in North America, BASF has built a second Ludwigshafen in China. In 2024, chemical production has fallen for the third year in a row and will be a fifth lower than before the pandemic.

Germany and its supplier states in Central Europe are in the midst of a massive industrial crisis. The German export model, which has long been responsible for growth and a higher standard of living than elsewhere, is at an end. We are in the middle of the long-delayed attack on core workforces. The deindustrialisation is intended to wear them down, the crisis scenario is intended to shock everyone and clear the way for a new labour regime. In addition to the ‘employment security agreement’, VW has also terminated other collective contracts: for better pay for temporary workers and one for the takeover of apprentices. An agreement that regulates the co-management by the works council regarding pay and conditions in excess of those determined by the general collective contract is likely to be scrapped. As in the 1990s and 2000s, management is playing off old against young, office against assembly line and production locations against each other….

… is an opportunity

In the third quarter of 2024, VW, Mercedes and BMW together spent 8.7 billion Euros on research and development – and despite this were able to record an operating profit of 7.1 billion. The diesel scandal will have cost Volkswagen an estimated 32 billion Euros. With more than 150 billion Euros in debt, VW is one of the three most indebted companies in the world. Nevertheless, VW’s 2023 balance sheet shows a net profit of over 16 billion Euros. Of this, 4.5 billion was distributed, almost half of it to the Porsche-Piëch clan. Those who read not only the VW press releases but also the balance sheets will find ‘no further ammunition for the management’s argument that historic cost reductions and sacrifices must be made by the workforce in Germany’ (Bernstein Research). The bosses do not have to avoid losses, they want higher profits! [12]

In a situation of plant closures, workers’ power seems to disappear at first. Works councils and climate activists propose self-management and “meaningful production”, for example trams, trains, buses, bicycles. Many see the mobilisation at GKN in Italy as a model, young people discuss the compatibility of ecology and production. In northern Germany, activists are also targeting Tesla and VW, some are making existential decisions (activists moved to Wolfsburg and propagated a fundamental change in the transport sector: VW should build public transport; however, the first attempt failed). The discussion among left-wing activists is at the stage where it is agreed that the industrial capacities – plants and workers – are needed by society. [13] But so far, self-managed companies have quickly fallen by the wayside in the face of competition. Besides, there is also overcapacity in train, bus and bicycle factories. Others propagate the fight for maximum severance pay – let the place close and at least make the employer pay dearly. Deindustrialisation and a ‘structural change’ towards a ‘service economy’ mean lower and more unequal wages. Without industry, the proletariat becomes impoverished, as can be seen in the USA, Italy, etc. It is therefore of some significance whether the (VW) core workforce continues to merely watch their official representatives assist the capitalist fools, or whether they overcome their state of shock.

On the 30th of November, it was announced that Audi had sold a third of its Formula One shares to the Qatar Investment Authority.

On the 2nd of December, Carlos Tavares, the long-standing Citroën, Fiat, Opel restructurer and Stellantis boss, who was in the tradition of López, was dismissed more quickly than planned. To everyone’s surprise, his cost-cutting programmes turned out to be ‘unsustainable’.

On the 5th of December, the conservative EPP fraction of the European Parliament issued a position paper in which it proposed to reverse the combustion engine phase-out and to postpone new CO2 fleet limits (average amount of CO2 pollution of the total model range of a car maker). If the car giants had to pay penalties for not meeting the limits, the money should not go into the EU budget, but back into the car industry. Brilliant!

Footnotes

[1] Graefenhausen: In 2023 truck drivers, primarily from Georgia and Uzbekistan, occupied a service station in Germany for ten weeks in order to protest against not having been paid their outstanding wages by the transport company from Poland. Our article here

[2] ‘Lieferkettengesetz’: This law was enacted in 2024 and stipulates that companies in Germany with over 1,000 employees have to take legal responsibility for what is happening in their global supply chains.

[3] ‘The gross value added by a job in the automotive industry is 2.5 times higher than for an average job. Even if everyone who loses a job in the automotive industry immediately finds a new, average job, we still lose six per cent of our prosperity.’ (Sebastian Dullien) ‘Gross value added is the difference between the total value of goods and services produced and the value of inputs, i.e. the costs incurred in the production process.’ Kathrin Werner: Deutschland ohne Auto­industrie – wie groß wäre der Schaden? [Germany without a car industry – how bad would the damage be?] Süddeutsche 12.11.2024.

[4] Christian Müßgens: Volkswagens Urkrise [Volkswagen’s original crisis], FAZ 23.11.2024.

[5] Haiko Prengel: Ab nach Afrika [Off to Africa], Süddeutsche 8.3.2021.

[6] Wildcat article on the Hartz4 reform protests: https://libcom.org/article/protests-against-welfare-reform-germany-2004

[7] Wildcat article on the Opel strike: https://libcom.org/article/one-week-w...

[8] In the dossier ‘Auto’ on our website you will find ‘auto articles’ for each phase, for each strike, etc.

[9] ‘In Thuringia, the AfD received 49 percent of the votes from workers, in Brandenburg 46 percent, and in Saxony 45 percent of the workers. The influence of the far right obviously extends deep into the trade unions. According to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 42 per cent of unionised blue-collar workers and 30 per cent of unionised white-collar workers voted for the AfD in Thuringia. Klaus Dörre: Die verlorene Ehre der Arbeiter, bpb.de 20.11.2024

[10] Comprehensive data is provided in an IW Report from 22 September 2024: Thomas Puls: Die Automobilindustrie im Jahr 2024 [The Automotive Industry in 2024], IW Report 38/2024

[11] See Wildcat 113: What Energy Transition? The Electric Car and the Return of Mining, late summer 2024: https://www.angryworkers.org/2024/10/...

[12] See: Stephan Krull: Autoindustrie: Abstiegsängste und Abwehrkämpfe, Z 140, 24 November 2024. And: Autoindustrie – Abbau oder Umbau?, nd, 6.12.2024.

And: Suitbert Cechura: Konzept für Entlassungen, Junge Welt 5.12.2024.

[13] Jürgen Bönig: Nachhaltig zerstören – geht die Automobilindustrie den Weg der Druckmaschinenhersteller? [Sustainable destruction – is the automotive industry following the path of printing press manufacturers?] Lunapark 21, Winter 2024 – In 1961, Raniero Panzieri showed that there can be no technological continuity after the revolution because capitalist production relations are inherent in the productive forces. See: https://libcom.org/library/capalist-use-machinery-raniero-panzieri

The post Get out of the state of shock! – On the automobile crisis first appeared on Angry Workers.

Our comrade and friend Sher Singh died on the 25th of January 2025. We published his notes from conversations with workers from his last travel and a background text about our collaboration. Below you can find a short personal farewell and a tremendous article by our comrade from ‘Friends of Faridabad Majdoor Samachar’ that summarises Sher Singh’s political journey. This article is insightful for all who ask themselves how to remain both joyful and communist. Sher Singh taught us a lot in that regard.

arey, sher singh,

friend, saathi and most respected comrade,
how can i write to you now?

in 2001, i thought kamunist kranti
was a situationist student group at delhi university,
(who else would write a ‘ballade against work’),
but there you were with bhupinder
and his peasant-workers
healing hands,
at faridabad new town station,
where people live and crap
next to train tracks
and black coal flakes fall,
blown from that baboon-ruled power station,
hissing like stabbed hell,
through the guillotines
of million power presses,
and there you were,
sleeping on that plank in
a workers’ library without books,
and there we were

and i called you, my friend,
in the meantime, at the barbers,
who ran through autopin jhuggi’s
slum lanes,
next to that foul-farting
open drain,
to get you on the phone

there you were,
stubborn laughing
giraffe-eyed comrade mule,
cooking one-pot khichdi
under that anorexic neem tree
and that jumbled red thread
that spuns merrily
from zimmerwald to mattick to kapashera roof tops,
where we slept amongst dozens of textile or car workers,
(where you slept, and i laid awake)
during power cuts,
you made us count each newspaper,
each month,
to be distributed
at okhla railway crossing or
in manesar industrial zone,
hundreds of mornings,
thousands of conversations,
at tea stalls,
in workers’ rooms,
at pickets,
we listened to workers

i soaked you in,
my friend,
stories of travels
through states of emergencies,
tales of niyogi and mayawati,
of peasant customs and
petty commodity production
under the east india company,
the 80s in faridabad,
how to pronounce the d
and dh, and t and th,
talking, talking,
there you were,
contradictory ascetic,
denouncing militancy,
but never late and the most harsh
to get the next paper out on time,
denouncing the ‘teach-preach’
of the leftist,
but monologuing,
compulsory optimistic,
till the cows come home

there we were,
you gave me confidence,
my friend,
that as communists
(“what kind of communists?!”)
we find people
who can touch us,
that simplicity
prevails,
that dedication
we saw mirrored
in us
allowed us to soften
for each other
(- how shaken
i saw you when
chintamani died)

there we are,
my comrade,
my compass of gentle determination,
my block-head friend,
how can i write to you now

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar : Communist Possibilities from Self-Critique

From: Kaam Se Chutti

On January 25, 2025, Comrade Sher Singh Ji passed away. From 1982 to 2020, he was the editor of Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar, and during this period, the way he reflected on his experiences and repeatedly transformed his practice will be of interest to every communist, to every person who sees joy in transformations of the old and obsolete. He worked to displace the populist-demagogic category of the “working class” to confront its reality, to understand it on its own terms, and to turn the hidden potential for change and vibrant energy within it into a source of thought-practice. He shared this work with all of us.

In the article below, we have outlined his journey based on conversations with him and his writings. There is no doubt that we may not have fully understood him, and someone who understands him better may correct our mistakes. We would welcome that. But at this moment, it feels very important to say these things. Alongside this, there is a request, which is also mentioned at the end of the article and is being repeated here—if you would like to share your thoughts about Sher Singh Ji, Majdoor Samachar, or “kamunist kranti,” please send them to kaamsechhutti@gmail.com. You can also write in the comments section here. How you met him, in what context, what impression you formed of him or he of you, whether it changed, mutual criticisms, etc.—whatever comes to your mind, please share it with us.

friends-of-fms-feb-2025Download With Delphi car workers after their wildcat strike

The post In memory of Sher Singh – Comrade of Kamunist Kranti and Faridabad Majdoor Samachar first appeared on Angry Workers.

We document this short text by comrades from Movements for Class Autonomy KTA from Greece on the recent mobilisations against the state’s response to the Tempi railway accident.

The facts

Two years after the Tempi railway crime, we may not yet know exactly what happened that February night, but what everyone knows now, is how things are run in this country: the Greek government and the bosses of the railway have been working together so that Hellenic Train can reduce the cost of operating the trains, thus making profit from the transportation of people and goods, legally or illegally. The Greek state has been turning a blind eye, constantly reducing the funding for rail transport, therefore demonstrating indifference towards the value of providing a decent service for passengers, but also securing fundamental safety to the basic safety standards for the lives of passengers. In the last two years, this has been proven dozens of times since one railway “accident” follows another, with mathematical precision. At this point, it is important to note that right before the collision of trains in Tempi, railway workers had repeatedly warned, through announcements, about the tragic and dangerous state of the railway infrastructure and the risk of an accident.

Cover-up

Was this what prompted hundreds of thousands of people to take matters to the streets once more and protest about a month ago? The answer is yes, but there is more to it. It was also the ruthless attempt by every part of the state apparatus – the government, the police, the fire department, the judiciary system, the official propaganda, state and private – to cover-up what happened. The area was dug by the fire department to prevent evidence of an explosion from being retrieved, audio and video footage was hidden or distorted, the guilty ones were not brought to justice, witnesses were not called to testify, senior judges recommended prayer and patience to mothers who have lost their children. And if it wasn’t for the relatives and friends of the victims to persistently claim their right to know why they lost their loved ones, the case would have been archived without a conclusion.

However, we think that the public debate should not be limited to the issue of the presence of illegal flammable cargo. Those who choose to “act as the opposition to the government” by limiting the debate to the issue of smuggling do so deliberately to abdicate their own responsibilities. Smuggling has always existed and continues to exist in the railway sector, similarly to the health industry and in every service of the private sector in the form of tax evasion. And all of these are crimes that place a burden on our shoulders, which must be paid for. But it is not only that. Most importantly, what needs to be highlighted are the policies that have paved the way for this crime by devaluating the railway industry.

Similarly to two years ago, there is a danger that the long-standing liability for the criminal status of the greek railways will be attributed exclusively to the current government. We must not forget that the entire power structure is responsible for this, i.e. — political parties (Nea Dimokratia, PASOK, SYRIZA) and its employees (the management of the train company), the state-run union leaderships, the private companies Aktor and Alstom that undertook the maintenance projects, and the bosses of Hellenic Train.

They are all responsible for dismantling the unified form of the railway and partially privatizing it, the absence signaling system & remote control system, the understaffing of services. All of them chose or agreed to “tip the scale” favoring profiteering at the expense of travel safety. All of them will have to pay for our 57 dead people.

Justice

How is it possible to expect this complex network of power relationships and interests to be held accountable? What does it mean when they say “lets leave justice do its job”, other than allowing it to cover up this crime?

We have seen for so long the maneuvering of powerful groups and the arguments they have been employing to obscure the case. After the first few months since the incident, they have been presenting it as outcome of human error, attempting to transform the issue from political to technical. Also, they often refer to it as an issue of mismanagement and – after the massive demonstrations of the 26th of January – offered to demonstrate governmental readiness to put the blame on specific government executives and directors, with the aim of venting the anger of the people. From the above it becomes clear that the game of cover-up is ongoing and has many levels.

We believe that “justice” is neither independent nor neutral: it is class-based. If the children of a member of parliament or a big businessman had been on the train, the cases would have resolved, those responsible would have been convicted and huge compensation would have been given to the victims. The only way to deliver justice based on the interests of the ones at the bottom of the power hierarchy, is to expose the truth and those responsible for the crime with continuous, mass and collective struggles.

It is a fact that many people have understood this. If there is something that brought so many people to the streets on January 26, it is certainly the deep conviction that the lives of all of us, who are forced to sell our labor to live, have become more uncertain and very cheap. And this is not only to do with safety in transportation, but also in our work place ; education; healthcare; in the fulfilment of every basic needs and in every aspect of our daily lives. The reason for this is because the bosses, – i.e. the employers and the political personnel that represent them – have managed to put the burden of the crisis on our shoulders, by presenting problematic situations as issues of individual responsibility or invoking external factors for every evil that afflicts our class. E.g. a virus from China is to blame for the health disaster of the pandemic, not the degradation of public healthcare. The war in Ukraine is to blame of the raising of prices in the stores, not the pampering of the stores’ bosses. The stationmaster is to blame for the railway crime in Tempi, not the complete devaluation of the railway.

If we can extend this understanding to the point of realisation that simply staying home on our couch is not the solution then we will have taken another step in the right direction. It might seem costless to express statements on social media such as “everyone is the same,” “I feel frustrated with the political system,” “nothing is happening,” “things will never change,” “there is no alternative to capitalism”. However, in our day-to-day lives, such statements cost a lot, because they offer no solution to anything.

It is a fact that the antagonist movement has fallen back at all levels since 2012. However, it is also true that between 2006 and 2012 there were mass struggles against educational reforms, austerity policies and fascists in the streets. During this time, we managed to block – to some extent – the huge attack that the greek and international bosses launched against us. And we did this because we relied on our own collective forces, creating neighborhood assemblies, self-organized collectives in workplaces and universities, collective groups of survival in the midst of the crisis, putting into practice the perspective of autonomy of our class.

However, it is because we abandoned this collective effort, that is why we have reached the point where we are now. On the other hand, only if we find oxygen to revitalize new communities of struggle, in every social field, that perhaps we will have a chance that things evolve differently, beyond some sort of political laundering or a mere governmental change in a few years.

This requires initiatives for the formation of new horizontal, self-organized and autonomous processes of struggle, which will pursue three basic demands:

– to shed light on the Tempi crime and hold all those responsible accountable

– to offer support to the survivors and relatives of the victims, who to this day have been subjected to criminal indifference by the state

– to establish social control of the railway as well as all public transport by passengers and employees, who will determine how the sector will be run, e.g. the frequency and safety of every transportation medium, the cost and routes that will best serve social needs

ΚΤΑ | Μovements for Class Autonomy

February 2025

The post Our response to the Tempi railway crime – By KTA from Greece first appeared on Angry Workers.

In the coming weeks we will translate and publish several articles on the political economy of AI and the new coalition between the Trump government and the ‘tech-capitalists’. The articles were written by comrades of the German magazine Wildcat. We have already shared one article on the impact of AI on translator’s work that you can read here.

Many on the left were surprised about the new coalition between aggressive nationalism and the tech-sector. The tech-sector was largely seen as a liberal ally because of its global nature and because it was very successful in hiding its ‘dirty secret’ of manual labour, water pollution and brutal mining regimes. This mystification as a clean and liberal industry was partly aided by lefty ideological concepts such as ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘network capitalism’. The text below shows how dependent the ‘tech-sector’ is on aggressive state policies, in order to defend global monopolies, enforce new (nuclear) energy regimes and maintain a racist division of labour.

Leland Stanford fled from his workers to Palo Alto, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars

Palo Alto was the birthplace and is the capital of Silicon Valley; Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Cisco, Facebook, Instagram, Google, AMD, SanDisk, Adobe, Symantec, Yahoo, eBay, Nvidia and many other so-called ‘tech companies’ come from here. In his book Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris tells the story of American capitalism through this small town of 68,000 inhabitants in the Santa Clara Valley, its geographic name.
Each new generation of adventurers in Palo Alto presented itself as ‘pioneers’, who try a fresh start. In doing so, they referred positively to the land conquests of the ranchers, the massive land destruction caused by people during the gold rush (their ‘hydrolickers’ were a precursor of fracking), and the racialised exploitation in railway construction, in the mines and in agriculture. In fact, there is a common thread running from the ‘early pioneers’ to the early chip factories and the start-ups: Palo Alto has repeatedly managed to change the rules of the game in order to extend a very old system of privilege.
Palo Alto stands for a speculative capitalism, always on the verge of fraud, and for an exploitation that believes it can keep its fingers clean because it banishes the exploited from view, sometimes to the other side of the world. Silicon Valley is dominated by a team made up of Stanford University and venture capitalists.

Stanford

The first Western settlers massacred the buffalo herds to starve the native inhabitants of the land; within 20 years, the prospectors (people engaged in gold mining) had murdered 80 percent of the original inhabitants. With the founding of the federal state of California, genocide became official policy: ‘That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.’ (the first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, in a speech to the California legislature).
In California, the concept of ‘whiteness’ became institutionally powerful [wirkmächtig] for the first time in history. In contrast to the East Coast, Italians, Irish, Germans, Swiss and Portuguese were granted equal rights and could get land and jobs more easily. The native inhabitants, the Chicanos, and later the Chinese, the Japanese, Filipinos, Punjabis and African Americans were denied this. As another governor of California said about Chinese immigrants: ‘There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race’ – that governor was Leland Stanford.

The construction of the transcontinental railway had made him a railway millionaire. Fleeing from the (poor) masses of San Francisco, who hated him, he moved to his huge latifundium right next to San Francisco in the small town of Palo Alto. He later founded a university there, Leland Stanford Jr. University; it is still the most important training ground for the Internet companies. Its first president was David Starr Jordan, an enthusiastic eugenicist who was concerned about the ‘blood of the nation’ and the ‘degeneration of the races’ and wanted to create a new, rejuvenated type of human being in California: entrepreneurial, open to the world, allied with the most modern technology.

To this day, Silicon Valley is dominated by the great-grandchildren of these ‘valorisers of human capital’ who fantasised about breeding superior humans. Among the ‘Californian engineers’ who put their know-how at the service of the mining conglomerates, the railway, the land speculators, and then the arms industry, was the future US president Herbert Hoover, also a Stanford graduate. Hoover was a supporter of the efficiency movement and Taylorism; he became very rich by implementing the racial division of the working class in the mining industry, which had been so successfully tested in California, in the British colonies worldwide. Using his great wealth, he donated systematically to Stanford University, to which he owed his rise and whose development he influenced with his donations. Bill Gates is an extreme example, but he is by no means the first to demonstrate the influence of billionaire foundations.

As Food Administrator under President Woodrow Wilson, Hoover enforced food rationing in 1917 (hence the term ‘to hooverize’). In 1920, he became Secretary of Commerce. In this role, he promoted the radio and aviation industries, both of which benefited the Bay Area. He served as US President from 1929 to 1933 and is best known for his drastic austerity measures. In 1922, Hoover published his essay American Individualism, in which he propagated the superiority of private enterprise in the USA over ‘European capitalism and communism’.

The arms industry (Navy and Air Force) brought large-scale immigration to Los Angeles and the rest of the Bay Area. During World War II, several aviation companies, including Lockheed, settled in the area around the region’s central military airfield. These companies served as a stepping stone for the high-tech industry. During the Cold War, the US government launched a major research funding programme.
The defence industry, which had been the mainstay of Palo Alto since the 1950s, was building components for a new kind of war: semiconductors and other high technology for the arsenal of absolute destruction. Stanford’s head of administration, Fred Terman, created a ‘Technology Park’, and the many innovative companies that settled there worked on intercontinental missiles and similar projects. In 1965, the Pentagon bought 70 per cent of the microelectronic components produced there.

The second important man in the concentration of the computer industry in the valley was William B. Shockley, son of another historical Stanford figure (Shockley Sr. was closely associated with Hoover). In 1956, he founded the first semiconductor company in the area, which developed electronic components based on the semiconductor material silicon that is commonly used today, which gave Silicon Valley its name. Shockley, tyrannical and also an eugenicist, scared away all of his personnel; the young men who had wrestled themselves free from his influence became the first founders of Silicon Valley. One of them was Gordon Moore (see below).

Venture capital

Stanford had already become extremely wealthy through something that is now called ‘venture capital investment’. These venture capitalists continue to shape the history of Silicon Valley to this day. They have influenced the way we live and work even more than Google and Co. The more inventions made in Palo Alto turned into a symbol for innovation, the more they determined what was understood by progress in general. For a long time, they were less visible than the high-tech companies they controlled. This has changed with the ‘Paypal Mafia’ (see below),

For this type of manager, ‘competition and dominance, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hatred (…) are not problems, but the purpose of capitalist technology. (…) This was Jordan’s plan, Hoover’s plan, Shockley’s plan, and today it is Peter Thiel’s plan.’ (Malcolm Harris: Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and the World; Little, Brown and Company, Boston 2023) Venture capitalists like Thiel do not employ large workforces, but rather investment analysts, programmers and teams of software engineers. And the companies in which they invest also usually keep their distance from the exploitation of surplus value from large workforces by using subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. Apple is a typical example of this: design in Silicon Valley, production in Asia.

Speculative capital and ‘progress’

In 1957, eight engineers – including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore – resigned from Shockley and founded their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Sherman Mills Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instruments provided $1.5 million in start-up financing.

In 1958, Robert Noyce succeeded in producing the first monolithic integrated circuit (IC). This invention was mainly based on the planar technology developed by Fairchild, which for the first time allowed several transistors, diodes and resistors to be placed on a silicon substrate, later called a ‘chip’. In 1965, another milestone was the first operational amplifier that was manufactured entirely within a housing (with silicon as the semiconductor material and integrated circuits).

In 1968, Moore and Noyce left the company and founded Intel (Integrated Electronics). In July 1969, Intel brought the first 64-bit SRAM chip to the market. In October 1970 – half the time originally estimated – the first ‘highly integrated’ DRAM memory module.

In 1965, Gordon Moore had promised ‘lower costs and faster turn around’ in a three-and-a-half-page letter to the investors of Fairchild Semiconductor – the letter was barely disguised as a research article (‘The experts look ahead – Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’). It contained two graphics, a rather silly cartoon-style drawing, bold claims, the usual science speak, glowing predictions (some of which came true, some of which were way off the mark) and, of course, his ‘observation’ that computing power doubles every year per chip. He wanted to reassure investors who were feeling insecure because Fairchild Semiconductors had just lost a lot of capable engineers. When he made his observation a ‘law’ ten years later – now as head of Intel – Moore doubled the interval to 24 months. (‘A conversation with Gordon Moore: Moore’s Law’; 1975) For a long time, Intel was able to use ‘Moore’s Law’ to control technology development, industrial investment decisions and government subsidy policy.

Initially, Intel dominated the market with the ‘Intel 8008’, released in 1972. It was the standard CPU for a long time and was widely used in cash registers, traffic lights, bank terminals, weighing systems, controllers, but also in cruise missiles. Motorola was able to keep up with Intel for some time, especially in the home computer and Apple computer markets. But in 1974, Intel released the 8080, the processor that made home computers and the CP/M operating system popular. It was also used in the Altair 8800, which was launched in 1975 as a $395 kit (around $2000 in today’s purchasing power); a television set served as a monitor, and audio cassettes were used for storage. The Apple 1 came in 1976, followed by the Commodore PET in 1977. In 1977, the Apple II: 8-bit Apple Bus system, eight free slots, ‘open system’ (all essential design details were published). There were numerous video games and software for the Apple II; it was very important for the US BBS (Bulletin Board System / electronic mailbox via modem) scene.
The personal computer was a completely new concept: no longer an input console in a networked system, but a separate, freely programmable machine. In terms of resource consumption, it was a pretty crazy concept. But it caught on for decades – similar to the way the car won out over public transport.

Wintel – the devilish Siamese twins

The successor to the 8080, the Intel 8086, was the first 16-bit processor to be released in 1978. The 8088 followed in 1979 as a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data bus to enable cheap peripherals. This is when IBM, the world’s leading computer manufacturer, entered the picture. At the beginning of 1980, IBM commissioned developer Bill Lowe to develop a ‘personal computer’. Lowe chose the 8088, thus laying the foundation for Intel’s rise to become the world’s largest chip producer; at times, 85 percent of PC CPUs came from Intel.

And IBM produced a second monopolist. After all, the operating system for the new PC was not to be written by IBM engineers either. Bill Gates, who was 25 at the time, seized the opportunity – even though he didn’t actually have an operating system. Instead, he bought Tim Paterson’s Quick and Dirty Operating System QDOS for $50,000 and licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS 1.0. Gates’ real coup, however, was that he retained the rights to DOS and was thus able to turn his company Microsoft into a global software giant with MS-DOS. DOS became the industry standard.

On the 12th of August 1981, IBM presented the IBM PC 5150, developed in the greatest secrecy, in New York. The thing was disappointing: the chip was not powerful enough for a decent graphics display. DOS was criticised as a weak software architecture… But the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC was able to execute more complex calculation models than the Apple II and ousted the competition from the offices. Gates also recognised this and finally made himself a monopolist with Excel.

When the PC became a mass product in the 80s, there was talk of a software crisis again. Twice as much money was invested in the maintenance of software as in its development. ‘Quick and dirty’ had its price – and the others had to pay it. Window 3.x was based on it, was also ‘market-dominating’ and not a bit better. In the 90s, maintenance and service costs rose again by 30 per cent.

During these decades, Intel and Microsoft developed a symbiotic partnership, which was called ‘Wintel’ in the industry. Every new version of Windows needed better chips. Even today, Microsoft is still exploiting its monopoly position and forcing users to purchase new hardware when upgrading to Windows 11 – even where it is not necessary.

Intel was also a pioneer in surveillance technology. In 1999, it was revealed that the first Pentium III processors were equipped with a globally unique ‘processor ID’ that could be read by software. Due to public pressure, Intel switched off the processor ID by default. But since 2008, all chipsets for Intel processors have been equipped with the Intel Management Engine. This is an autonomous subsystem based on Minix that allows administrators to bypass the operating system and gain full access to the computer, even when it is turned off.

The dot-com crash of 2000 and the global crisis of 2008 hit Intel hard. In addition, Intel missed out on the smartphone business. In 2013, the management was replaced. But there were repeated glitches in production and delays in the introduction of new chip models. In 2017, Intel withdrew from the race for ever lower ‘technology nodes.’ The foundries of TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung had outperformed Intel. ‘Moore’s Law’ was now officially dead.

Intel’s problem remained production. Intel was also unable to benefit from the AI boom, but proved adept at securing government aid. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO in 2021 and campaigned for billions in government financial aid in both Europe and the US (Intel will receive almost $20 billion in subsidies and loans under the Chips and Science Act alone). The ten billion subsidies promised by the German government for the factory in Magdeburg – diverted from the ‘climate fund’ – would have corresponded to three million euros per planned job! But now it won’t happen. Over the course of 2024, Intel’s stock has lost around 60 percent of its value; in August, it plunged 26 percent in a single day. Intel recently made the largest quarterly loss in the company’s history, at $16.6 billion. After he laid off 15 percent of the workforce and closed the Magdeburg factories in September, it then hit Gelsinger himself at the beginning of December and he was removed. Even before that, Microsoft had begun to develop Qualcomm into a potent competitor to Intel. The end of Moore’s Law – the end of Wintel.

In this crisis, the company took shelter under the wings of the military-industrial complex: Intel is also to receive up to three billion dollars for the development of a domestic chip production from the US military’s Secure Enclave programme. (Even Gordon Moore could only name the military and the Apollo moon programme as potential customers in his 1965 letter to investors…). And the EU can forget the goal of the European Chips Act passed in 2023 to double Europe’s market share of global computer chip production to twenty percent. The aim was to become independent of semiconductor production in Southeast Asia.

Disruption

All that money went to Steve Jobs of Apple and to Bill Gates of Microsoft not because they had the better products, but because they were the tools for large companies like IBM and General Electric to undermine the high wages of their unionised workforces. It’s the same today, Elon Musk wants to show that you can build rockets without regulations and a space agency.

‘Apple could build computers without unions‘ (Harris p. 507), that was Steve Jobs’ real skill. Exploiting inventions that had previously been made possible by taxpayers’ money. The iPhone is the best-known example of this: the GPS used in it is a US military project, the music comes as MP3, an invention of the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, and the groundbreaking display is based on research work – also state-funded – by a US professor.

From the very beginning, Apple’s rise was based on racialised labour. Almost 80 percent of the employment growth in the Valley between 1984 and 1997 was in subs (externally contracted workers). In the 1990s, 40,000 immigrants from Indochina (one third of their total number) were employed in subs with PCB assembly, while in the whole of California, industrial jobs in electrical and electronic engineering fell by 38.7 per cent between 1980 and 1995.

‘The Silicon Valley labour regime did not enlarge the cake, but was good at shifting shares of it from workers to bosses, managers and shareholders.’ (Harris p. 524f.) Tech companies were “lean” (lean) because they outsourced as much as possible. Their ideal was a company that worked on an idea, software. All the material work was outsourced to subcontractors, either locally or further afield. The founder of TSMC, Chang, also a Stanford graduate, went further afield: under Deng’s opening-up policy, his Taiwanese company was given the opportunity to produce in mainland China.

The dynamics of the flight ahead

Semiconductor Fairchild was a typical ‘startup’ financed by venture capitalists. It was precisely this constellation of science/technology/industry depending on investors that had led to the formulation of ‘Moore’s Law’. The business model has remained the same from Moore to Gates to Bezos: convince investors of your own ‘potential’ until you have pushed all competitors out of the market and become a monopoly. The dynamics of software development (in terms of working conditions, orientation towards use value, etc.) has more in common with the sale of insurance than with industrially organised processes (Word for Windows was pushed into market readiness during the famous ‘death march’, after which everyone went on a company holiday in Cancun – the ‘error analysis’ of the software was done only after it entered the market). In the early 1960s, Romano Alquati had worked out that at Olivetti the customer does the final inspection – but since DOS ff. the customer has become a co-developer (‘banana principle’). This way of developing software for PCs was then transferred to the production processes themselves. Today, the ‘minimum viable product’ is the industry standard. Permanent updates follow, also because most errors can be traced back to software.

The responses to the ‘software crisis’ at the end of the 1960s and the ‘Wintel’ monopoly have led to huge profits and a massive waste of resources. The ‘crisis solution’ at the end of the 1960s was a headlong rush into the arms of investors who have to be convinced again and again: the next generation is supposed to keep the promise with which the current combination of hardware/software was sold.
This dynamic determines the entire sector: the 3G mobile communications standard, which was auctioned off at a very high price at the height of the dot.com boom in 2000, has never been exhausted. And 5G was introduced before the scope of 4G was even close to being exhausted; when it comes to attracting investment, they are already talking about 6G.
* At the beginning of the 80s, the PC was touted as a universal machine – by the end of the decade, everyone was despairing of Windows 3.0.
* In the 90s, the internet promised to transform every industry – by the end of the decade, we had the dot-com crisis.
* After the global crisis, big data and platform economics flourished – until the tech crisis.
Each time, productivity gains were promised, each time working conditions deteriorated – and none of them resulted in macro economic productivity gains.
So now it’s the turn of AI.

AI as the final stage?

The Large Language Models are the latest hype from Silicon Valley. ‘More profound than fire or electricity,’ says Sundar Pichai, the head of Google. ‘Comparable to the invention of the internet,’ says Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft. AI will ‘bring prosperity and wealth the world has never seen before,’ says Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI. To do so, he says, he needs only seven trillion dollars to radically expand the semiconductor industry, nuclear energy to meet the power needs of the data centres, and more freedom for American entrepreneurship (Altman’s main job is venture capitalist, he has invested in hundreds of start-ups). Altman sees himself at the helm of a techno-optimistic empire. Silicon Valley billionaires have ‘reached a point where they feel they should control the world,’ warned Mark Cuban, a tech billionaire himself, in the summer. The ‘Paypal Mafia’ (as they call themselves) sees the possibility of using Trump to ‘take power’.

(We have already written about the Paypal Mafia and their ‘long-termism’ ideology in Wildcat 110 and Wildcat 112, so we will keep this as brief as possible.)

The Paypal Mafia takes over

Trump opened the door to the billionaires of Silicon Valley by nominating J. D. Vance (otherwise he would never have stood a chance against Kamala Harris’s 1.5 billion dollar election campaign). He would not be the first president to be made compliant by Silicon Valley. In 1996, they dissuaded Bill Clinton from Proposition 211. This was a bill in California that would have redefined the admissibility of lawsuits against bosses of companies of the type common in the wider Silicon Valley area. Their private-sector control of information would have been called into question. An alliance of companies such as Intel, Sun and Cisco formed to oppose it. They spent forty million dollars until Clinton, initially a supporter of the bill, then wavering, finally declared that the proposed instrument was ‘bad for the economy’. Proposition 211 failed.

Elon Musk is the most controversial figure in Trump’s takeover of power. With the planned ‘Government Efficiency Agency’, which he is taking over together with climate change denier and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he wants to prune public institutions. The influence of Peter Thiel, an extreme example of the power of venture capitalists, is greater. In 1998, Thiel and two others founded the company Confinity in Palo Alto. In March 2000, Confinity and Elon Musk’s company X.com founded the start-up PayPal; Thiel invested 280,000 US dollars. He took PayPal public in 2002. He ultimately realised $55 million by selling it to eBay. Thiel was also the first external investor in Facebook. He invested $500,000, which he later converted into shares. When Facebook went public in May 2012, he sold shares for $640 million, and shortly thereafter sold more shares for around $400 million.

280,000 became 55 million, half a million became more than 100 million. Venture capital investments only have to be successful once for you to be astronomically rich for the rest of your life. And if you then invest some of that money in start-ups in the early stages and spread it across enough companies, especially those that are financed by other large venture capitalists, it is almost impossible to lose money in the process. Some clever young entrepreneurs had understood this and joined forces to form the ‘Paypal Mafia’. Today, Silicon Valley is the third most billionaire-rich place in the world, after New York and Hong Kong (84).

Thiel was involved in the founding of many other companies. Together with Joe Lonsdale and others, he founded the data analysis company Palantir, which supplies the CIA and the Pentagon with software and is involved in the war in Ukraine. Thiel’s private fortune is estimated at twelve billion dollars.
For several years now, there has been a shift in Silicon Valley towards the Pentagon. This is because the Pentagon is willing to pay huge sums for software that is not particularly good. Palantir was the pioneer in 2003. In 2015, the Pentagon founded the Defense Innovation Unit. Arms manufacturer Palmer Luckey also wants to win wars with AI. Trump and Vance’s election victory consolidates this trend. Thiel and Joe Lonsdale have built J. D. Vance.

Their ideology

“Diversity” is a “cancer,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital Fund, explains in a podcast. Elon Musk is virtually obsessed with a ‘woke mind virus’ that is not only destroying companies, but also ‘civilisation’ itself. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen declares terms such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘social responsibility’ to be ‘enemies’ and ‘zombie ideas’, many of which originated from ‘communism’.
Thiel believes that liberal democracy has failed. He argues that only right-wing nationalism can provide a ‘decisive corrective’ to the ‘madness of the masses.’ Companies are better run than governments, he says, because they have a sole decision-maker at the top with quasi-dictatorial authority. He is critical of women’s suffrage, although it should not be abolished for tactical reasons. But the participation of women, elections and democratic participation in general are not a promising way to control a free society. By this, Thiel imagines a world in which rich men are free to impose their will without being restricted by regulations or a ‘redistribution economy’.

This elitism still refers to the mediocre writer Ayn Rand. In her bestseller Atlas Shrugged (which has been repeatedly republished in German under various titles: Der freie Mensch, Der Streik, Wer ist John Galt? Atlas wirft die Welt ab), she argues that ‘workers and other mediocre people attach themselves like parasites to the ideas and efforts of a few gifted people’. State regulations are only sticks in the spokes of good entrepreneurs. It is not the working population that creates wealth, but the elite. The world must be re-founded on ‘the virtue of greed’.

Such thoughts have been further developed by ‘effective altruism’; it is rooted in the idea that it is imperative to choose, through cool calculation, the act that will ‘effectively’ do more good for more people. It is the current ideology of the Palo Alto billionaires, just as Taylorism and the Efficiency Movement were in the days of Hoover. You should make as much money as possible and then use foundations to exert political influence, as Bill Gates does. ‘Long-termism’ is the top priority. So, for example, not donating to charities, such as Welthungerhilfe (World Food Aid), but to space programmes, so that trillions of future humans can lead happy lives as members of an interstellar civilisation. What are a few million children starving today compared to the ten to the power of x future children on other planets who are prevented from ever being born?

The investments of Silicon Valley billionaires are ‘strategic’ in the sense of long-termism. Thiel has invested several million dollars in research to overcome the aging process in humans and is interested in cryopreservation; Musk is driving the Mars mission and owns the company Neuralink…

South Africa

Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. His socialisation as a youth took place in the notoriously brutal South African veldskools, in survival camps where he and other adolescents were encouraged to fight each other. Today, he relaxes by watching cage fights with Trump. Thiel, who was born in Germany, also lived in South Africa as a child in the 1970s. David Sacks, another member of the Paypal mafia, was born in Cape Town and, like Thiel, is a graduate of Stanford. At an event at his home in San Francisco, he raised more than $12 million for Trump. Together with Thiel, he wrote a book titled The Diversity Myth in 1995. In it, they claim that promoting diversity weakens higher education and academic freedom.
Their warnings about the end of white supremacy are reminiscent of the fears of white South Africans about the ANC. Musk tweeted about an impending ‘white genocide’ in 2022. Thiel also patronises Curtis Yarvin, a start-up founder who is considered a thought leader of the so-called New Right (‘neo-cameralism’) and equated the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik with the ANC’s violent struggle for freedom. Yarvin is not particularly intelligent, a terrible conspiracy windbag who considers universalism to be a ‘mystery cult of power’.

Their political programme

Marc Andreessen knows where salvation comes from: his techno manifesto sounds like the futurists’ enthusiasm for technology at the beginning of the 20th century: “Give us a problem in the real world, and we can invent the technology that will solve it.” [1]

Trump fits their techno-nationalist vision of American strength. From his government, they expect tax breaks and less regulation in key business areas, especially with regard to their investments in crypto currencies. By far the most important thing, however, is AI. This is where they have reached a critical point because, firstly, they are running out of money and, secondly, AI is not delivering as promised. Their capital and energy requirements exceed anything that a democratic government could provide. That is why the ambitions of the Paypal mafia go beyond economic issues. ‘This was not an election, this was a revolution, the end of a system that had outlived its usefulness,’ Thiel commented on Trump’s election victory.

The book Dawn’s Early Light by Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, was published only after the election – apparently to avoid harming Trump, since this right-wing think tank’s detailed Project 2025 had already met with vehement criticism. Roberts writes in familiar settler romanticism: ‘When dusk falls and you hear the wolves, you have to set up the wagons in a circle and load the muskets.’ In view of the country’s deeply rotten state, only total disruption will help. The existing hollowed-out institutions cannot be reformed – ‘they have to be burned down’. The foreword to this pamphlet was written by J. D. Vance.

The tech billionaires are by no means united – some hate each other. Bill Gates, for example, has donated to Kamala Harris, while Musk fiercely attacks Microsoft and OpenAI. And even the group behind Trump has contradictory and sometimes opposing positions. But it is precisely this that can lead to the kind of dynamic we saw in the Nazi movement: that their contradictions cancel each other out in a radicalisation.

P.S. dated 25/11/2024

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is joining a growing list of US companies making a U-turn on diversity. Among other things, the company will no longer consider race and gender when awarding supplier contracts.

Footnotes

[1]
“Our civilization was built on technology. … Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this — until recently. … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It is time to be Techno-Optimists. …I am here to deliver the good news.”
The opening lines of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto

The post From Palo Alto to Mars? – Wildcat on the tech-sector first appeared on Angry Workers.

We see an increase in small actions against the drive towards militarisation. From school students to doctors, from port workers to tram drivers. While significant parts on the left still collude in the ideological war games, these class actions give us hope. Sign the petition of the Munich tram drivers against Bundeswehr (German army) advertisement here!, check out their website and read their powerful text below.

We, tram drivers from Munich who are organised in the union Ver.di, do not accept that we should drive the tram (type T1, car 2804) through Munich, as the tram advertises for an alleged ‘career in the Bundeswehr’.

The slogan of the advertising, “Do what really counts”, already attacks our dinity as workers. Do they want to tell us that what we do, namely driving a the tram, doesn’t count, or doesn’t really count?!! This doesn’t just affect us, but all workers. We cannot seriously be expected to drive this insult to all workers through the streets.

Furthermore, quite a few of us are pacifists and cannot reconcile promoting training to kill with their conscience.

Recruiting children and young people is a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Germany is one of the very few countries where young people are recruited into the army. The United Nations, the Children’s Commission of the Bundestag, peace and children’s rights organisations, the GEW (trade union for education) and Ver.di have been protesting against this for years. The increasing public recruitment has contributed to the fact that every 11th recruit is now a minor.

We no longer want to be stooges in their game.

We demand:

The Munich Transport Corporation (MVG) must no longer allow itself to be used as a recruitment tool by the Bundeswehr!

For us, the following applies:

Workers do not shoot workers!
Metalworkers do not build tanks!
Transport workers do not transport military equipment!
Tram drivers do not drive Bundeswehr trams!
Support us with your signature!

Let us know when a Bundeswehr tram is running through the streets in your area! Even better: join this campaign in your city!

Let’s organise resistance – together!

Initiative group
‘Say NO to the Bundeswehr tram with us!’

The post Anti-militaristic action by courageous tram-drivers in Germany first appeared on Angry Workers.

We document this press release sent to us by comrades from Delhi on the current mobilisation of former Maruti Suzuki car workers. It is wonderful to see that so many of them are gathering together again, more than a decade after the severe repression of their struggle.

Back then, the state had to quell one of the most radical automobile workers struggles since perhaps the 1980s in South Korea. We feel privileged to have been able to meet many of them at the time and to write down impressions of their struggle. Now it seems the right time to recapitulate the milestones of the dispute – for a visual impression you can watch this documentary.

In June 2011, more than 3,000 young workers engaged in a wildcat sit-down strike in the world’s second biggest car factory.

In October 2011, the same workers occupied the factory and supplying plants for several days in response to a management attempt to divide permanent from temporary workers.

In July 2022, hundreds of workers attacked management personnel and factory buildings in response to management provocations. Maruti sacked over 500 workers, 147 workers were jailed and a dozen of them sentenced to life sentences for murder.

But the struggle continues.

More than three thousand non-permanent (contract, trainee, apprentice, TW, CW, MST etc) workers who have worked and working in Maruti Suzuki plants in Gurgaon-Manesar congregate in Gurgaon to demand permanent jobs, equal pay, salary increase and other demands

5th January 2025: In a significant move, more than three thousand erstwhile workers of Maruti Suzuki gathered for a mass meeting near Krishna Chowk in Gurgaon on Sunday, January 5th, 2025 in the founding general meeting of the Maruti Suzuki Asthayi Mazdoor Sangh. Many had travelled overnight to reach the venue from Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Orissa and other states. The workers have all served in various temporary capacities at the three plants of the automobile manufacturer in Gurgaon-Manesar. A charter of demand was prepared, adopted and signed in the meeting today. The workers also issued a call to gather in an even greater number at the Gurgaon DC office on January 10th to submit the Charter of Demands and make their presence felt before the labour department and the company management. The general meeting also elected a committee of representatives to coordinate its further activities.

Presently Maruti Suzuki employees 36,000 workers across its four plants, out of which a mere 17% are permanent and the rest are divided into various categories which include Temporary Workers 1 and 2, Casual Workers, Apprentices, Contract Workers and Student Trainees. The entire production of the plants are dependent on this temporary workforce, whereas the role of permanent workers has been limited to supervisory roles at best. There exists a huge pay gap between permanent and temporary workers, with permanent employees drawing an average salary of 1,30,000 while temporary workers draw salaries between 12,000 to 30,000. Temporary workers are recruited for a mere seven months at a time. Student trainees form another significant category of the workforce who are engaged in full production in the name of apprenticeship and ITI education, only to leave the plant after two-three years with a certificate that has no currency in the labour market.

The charter prepared by the workers demands permanent employment for all workers engaged in a permanent nature of work. The workers have demanded the creation of 30,000 permanent posts in the existing three plants. They have also demanded that the recruitment to all these posts including those in the upcoming plant in Kharkhoda, Sonipat should be held primarily from among those who have previously worked in any Maruti plant as temporary workers. In the meantime all temporary workers must be given a 40% pay hike and a ‘clearance amount’ equal to the difference in the salaries of temporary and permanent workers for every month of service in the company. With regard to the sham training process being conducted by the company, workers demanded that the government intervene to ensure that student trainees being recruited by the company are actually allowed to up-skill themselves and not be engaged as workers in the main production process.

The meeting was organised in the wake of a demand notice submitted by the Maruti Suzuki Struggle Committee on behalf of various categories of temporary workers presently working in the four plants. The meeting also received active support and assistance from Maruti workers terminated from the company in 2012. These workers have been agitating to be reinstated with back wages for their unfair dismissal and sitting in IMT Manesar in an indefinite sit-in since September this year.

The post Maruti Suzuki Workers in India – The struggle continues first appeared on Angry Workers.